utilitensil

It would probably take creation of something off my it'd-be-nice-if-such-things-existed-but-they-don't list (such as a magic anti-moron gun for use upon cars being driven like arseholes, the effect of which would be to cause the car to instantly vanish and the driver to experience immediate and prolific double incontinence) for Nicky to find me a present of a usefulness exceeding that of my pseudoTupperware plastic muffin case (used virtually every working day for four years to safely transport a muffin from freezer to desk) but a wee stove-top micro-espresso machine thing is nevertheless most useful, especially during holiday-times such as these; I had been muttering (though not in any way deliberately present-idea-provisionally) about getting one, partly to act as a spare in case the electrical coffee machine ever breaks, partly to enable drinking of tasty hot coffee-drinks when camping and partly to provide a means of getting a decent-tasting coffee when we pop to Ayr to visit Nicky's parents, who only have a rickety cafetière, tend to have the same bag of grounds on the go for periods exceeding two years and otherwise only stock only varieties of instant up at which even aficionados of the non-coffee-tasting brown evil dispensed by the beverage-provision units at work would turn their noses. Strangely enough, Nicky has recently taken to buying a type of instant which spouts some nonsense hyperbole about being the closest instant to proper yet which has an element of the same non-coffee taste as the stuff from the work machines, meaning I could now recreate the unpleasant taste of the drinks I occasionally took into office-meetings from 2005-2007 (after which I stopped attempting to drink work-coffee (if I couldn't use the contents of my flask) and converted to the hot chocolate) at home, if I wished to do so. It seems an unlikely thing to want to do but does at least mean that I can demonstrate what the machines at work are trying to get us to drink to people without access to them.