Apologies for mentioning the C-word when we’re well shot of it, but if they were to devise a top-10 list of people who gave ill-advised Christmas presents, then the singer Marvin Gaye would be a strong contender. Marvin gifted his father – with whom he had an extremely fractious relationship – a gun. Four months later, the father killed him with it.
This grim tale came to mind when Herself announced that for her birthday – some months off – her preferred present would be a set of knives. Not the stabby variety, but knives to be used in the kitchen.
As far as I know, Herself doesn’t have any immediate plans to skewer me. If she had, she probably would have given it a go already. Or perhaps not, given the knives we have would be unlikely to inflict much damage. We have one of those wooden block things, which is bulging with knives we have bought to be used instead of the blunt versions already there. But we’ve never thrown out the old ones. We should, but there’s something sinister about a bin full of knives and we don’t want to scare the waste disposal people.
We did get one of those middle-aisle electric knife sharpeners, but all it seemed to do was shave off tiny pieces of metal without improving the blade at all. We bought an electric carving knife, but that just seemed to want to disintegrate anything it touched rather cut it into neat slices.
There’s something sinister about a bin full of knives and we don’t want to scare the waste disposal people
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Part of the reason why we have ended up in this situation is because we don’t have a consistent need for sharpness in the kitchen. Most of the time, the knives we have are grand: in the Irish, damning-with-faint-praise sense. You can dismantle a chicken with them or make a cheese sandwich. It’s only occasionally that we need something a bit more high-spec.
My immediate instinct is to go online, but there might be legal difficulties with a possible murder weapon being delivered to the house
About once a year, I attempt to make beef Wellington. And I always fail. There’s always something slightly off about it. I get the cursed soggy bottom, or the pastry isn’t right or it comes out of the oven in a weird shape. My latest effort was just a few weeks ago, and while it looked better than most of my previous attempts, cutting it into sumptuous-looking slices proved impossible. In the end we had to hack it to bits.
Herself generously blamed the poor knives rather than the fact that I had somehow managed to render a previously tender piece of meat into a rock-hard consistency. This in turn led to her request that for the next birthday, I get her some good knives. Really good knives: the sort that are, I imagine, used by your average ninja. (The ancient warrior, not the air fryer). These knives will be kept in some sort of air-conditioned box with a combination lock known only to Herself, while all the crappy ones will remain for general use. “General” meaning me.
[ Daughter Number Four has been sucked into the slimosphere. We naively enabled itOpens in new window ]
So, while we do need a sharp knife perhaps three or four times a year, as a potential good-knife purchaser, I haven’t a clue. My immediate instinct was to go online, but there might be legal difficulties with a possible murder weapon being delivered to the house. I looked up some shops in Dublin – and you can pay thousands. But is a €1,000 knife ten times better than a €100 one? And these knives will have to be kept sharp. There is that metal bar thing I’ve seen butchers use, but they scare me. I can too easily imagine an accidentally severed finger flying into the sink.
Perhaps we need to accept that we really aren’t fancy-knives people; that this is just us having notions. Perhaps a good pair of scissors might do the trick. Yet if I give her that for her birthday, I really will risk getting stabbed with them.
