Pat calling the kettle crap

"Come and look at this" murmured the Harrogate-based alpha brother while beckoning me into his kitchen. The visual feast I was expected to provide a reaction to was a brand new kettle he'd bought, with a puzzling feature whereby it doesn't seem to take time to do anything. Rather than needing a standard three to four minute boiling period, you just fill it up, flick it on, and then it pours the water out at a boiling temperature within seconds, producing quickfire tea. I'm not quite sure how it works. I'm no scientist. Or electrician. Or interested. But it emerged that this freaky little instant-boiling device had set him back £63: for a kettle! That's just so Harrogate.

My brother wasn't happy with my luke-warm response (I take a while to boil up [*ba-dum-pa-tssssshh*]). I complained that it was a ridiculous purchase and an example of the kind of nonsensical gadget fetishism that kept the western world's false economies artificially afloat. You can do the same job with a 50-year old pan and a hob oven top if you're willing to wait a few minutes. I don't see removing the processes of life as being necessarily a good thing. We should really delight in process, so that the product is all the more appreciated. There's a certain therapy to putting the kettle on and being able to wander off and conduct some vital life-admin around the house, before returning like clockwork to witness the boiling point and having built up an even greater thirst than you started with. Then, quenching that thirst with a carefully-crafted cup of tea is just heaven. I've often read the back page of the Evening Gazette in the time it takes for the kettle to boil. Or made a toilet trip, made a chess move, or cut down a small tree. To remove the period of waiting time is also to remove the pleasure. It's teamaking for the iPod generation and it's sickening. What next? Nourishment without the pleasure of taste, without chewing and being able to manipulate the foodstuff from cheek to cheek for lasting thrills? Consuming literature without the sensuous licking of ones finger in order to turn from page to page to page (to page)?

His considered assessment of my reasons for being unimpressed by this iKettle was that I was "just jealous". This was the final straw. I pointed out that surely he meant I was envious rather than jealous, since jealously (in its unspoiled semantic form) means being fiercely possessive and guarded towards one's property. People have gradually distorted its meanings and just substituted it for envy. So, since I don't own an iKettle I'm unable to be jealous of it, but could feasibly be envious, even though I'm not. So there. I don't think the alpha brother wants to speak to me anymore.