When those clever little tinkers at ‘The Guardian’ land-lined me to say that they were sending over a new bit of kit to review, I’m afraid your favourite Uncle Stephen thought: heck, cripes and bless me with a shudder! Already time for me to test drive another fork? Were it only a month since the last? Then the package arrived and I nearly spilled my Twinings down my favourite cardigan. ‘Oh, my greatly fannied aunt!’ I cried, though oddly not thinking of my aunt at all, who was actually called Mildred. I was instead thinking: do I have room in my life for yet another fork?

Fret not, kind readers. It appears that I did and I will use words to explain all.

Let’s all act like gentlemen and polish off the basics: the packaging was adequate; a box of the variety known as ‘brown’ and with overtures of the ‘cardboard’. A knife made by a man called Stanley despatched all the blessed plastic tape that strapped the thing together. Soon I was knuckle to elbow in polystyrene foam packaging. Lord!

Yet those foolish packaging people should really have known better. This model of fork was crafted by the good robots of Taiwan and has all the strength we’ve come to expect from machine-pressed stainless steel. An upgraded version of the model I reviewed last month, it comes in a metal finish one would like to call ‘brushed’ but one finds impossible not to think of as ‘dull’. There you have it. Vulgar honesty. Whatever next?

I initially considered the fork unwieldy in these somewhat clumsy hands, though they do befit a man of some six feet and eighteen inches in height, but after I’d said ‘Calm thyself, Stephen’, hushed as though on a moonlit night, the fork began to sit comfortably twixt crafty fingers. Yes, you read that right. Even the handle.

Alas, we must speak of the handle. Mrs. Fry’s son would be doing a very poor job indeed were he to fail to mention the handle. While earlier fork handles maintained backward compatibility with older low digit-use protocols, with this latest fork, there’s none of that. We’re talking four fingers or more. So if you’ve not made that upgrade, you should really think of doing it now. And ‘tush!’ if you haven’t already.

The fork comes with both WiFi and GPS, which may sway your decision, but I like to say gimcrack. Gimcrack means ‘showy’. Helps to pad out my wordcount. As does mentioning that the fork stands out from the competitors in its class because of its ergonomic profile. There I go. Using one of those silly techobabblish phrases you won’t understand unless you’ve been to Cambridge. Luckily, I have been to Cambridge, so aren’t we the fortunate ones? ‘Ergonomic’: a horrible little word that drips off my lip like a drop of spittle or worse. Frightful and yet it simply means that one need not worry about using this fork at high speeds or whilst travelling down a motorway. Or is that ‘aerodynamic’. Of course it is. Silly me for even bringing it to your attention. Let’s speak of it no more. Let’s instead talk prongs.

Oh, shush. You know we would have to eventually talk prongs, for goodness sake! As you know: I, who is ‘me’, dearest Stephen, loves a fork with a promising prong. I own only the second fork with prongs sold in Europe. And the latest model disappoints not one jot in the prong. No, not even a bit of a jot prongwise. Nineteen of the lovely fellows, standing there, all in a row, makes it the class leader in prongs. Bless me! It takes a bit of time to get such a wide fork into your mouth and care you must take should you decide to do so. Your reviewer tried it in his cack-handed way and fed himself his own ear. Deary me. Chewing on said ear did, however, give me time to examine the fork more closely. I saw no expansion ports to allow the user to add further prongs but firmware updates should make this fork work with compatible Bluetooth-enabled knives and spoons in the future.

A piece of kit clearly designed to impress: impress it most certainly did. A surfeit of prongs, a nice stiff shaft (oh, be quiet!), this fork has better specifications than any other item of cutlery I’ve handled this year. You should really go out and buy yourself one and stop using your fingers. ‘Tis a shame you ever thought otherwise. Nonsense. Cripes. And, indeed, ferrets.

This second-rate piece of satire appeared courtesy of Private Eye who rejected it earlier.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 3:21 pm and is filed under News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.