Like everyone else I’d copped out. It’s not that I’d stopped liking thick, hand-cut slices of toast liberally covered in butter, and I certainly hadn’t stopped eating them, but because the butter lived in the fridge I made do with Lurpak Spreadable and, as the years ticked by, I forgot that, acceptable as the fake stuff is, real butter is better.
Then one day I was invited to join friends in a box at Lord’s on a day so glorious that I smiled for six hours. That was when I met a man called Gus and, perhaps because we were eating cute sandwiches, he told me about the ButterWizard. This, he announced with enthusiasm, would solve the irritating problem of butter being too hard, or too runny. He said he’d send me one, and you think, oh yeah, and you go home and get out the Spreadable.
But he did send me a ButterWizard and a remarkable thing it is: the first computerised butter dish. Fitted with a fan and a chip, it keeps your butter at a spreadable temperature so that on winter days you can have toast with proper butter, and on warm days your butter won’t disintegrate to an oily mush. Made from white plastic, the dish sits on a base, fitted with rechargeable batteries which, when plugged in, keeps the butter spreadable. You can take the dish off the base for up to two hours and adjust the temperature. Nice to know that you really can have your butter and eat it.
ButterWizard £34.95, from selected John Lewis, Debenhams and Fenwicks stores or www.butterwizard.com