Shiny, Shiny...

Today we took delivery of our new cooker at the extraordinary hour of 06:45 this morning. The delivery guys had driven two hours to get here, so Christ alone knows what time they start work in the wee small hours. I hope they are getting something like decent pay for their service, but I somehow doubt it. They took the old and severely knackered cooker with them: we've been using/abusing it for over ten years now, and it's range of functions have gradually dwindled over time from twin oven, grill and four hobs to just grill and four hob plates. I guess it doesn't owe us much, but compared to the very first stove we bought when we we living in our second flat in 1979/80; a 1950s era gas stove by New World, which we bought for the princely sum of either seven or fourteen pounds from the local paper's classifieds - I can't remember which, but I suspect the former - it was a waste of money. The New World [the exact same model of stove that my parents had from the fifties into the late seventies] lasted us from purchase until we left Gerlan Terrace in 1992, by which time the still-perfectly-functioning beast was well over forty years old. I doubt our shiny new purchase could ever aspire to such longevity: built-in obsolescence was not yet a thing when our old stove was manufactured, and never needed anything more than the occasional service by the old man to keep it trundling along happily. We cooked thousands of happy meals on that cooker, God bless it...