Today I said goodbye to a long time kitchen companion. My blender went to meet its maker while crumbling a batch of breadcrumbs for my Christmas Pudding. It didn’t make a fuss or go out with a bang, it chugged along wearily and then just stopped.

I feel a bit sad. My mother gave me that blender. I think it was the first Christmas after I was married. That’s more than 35 years of service. You can’t complain about that. It got me thinking about appliances generally and how many we’d owned over the years. It does seem like the older ones gave the best service.

My oldest appliance is a hand-held electric mixer. This came into the family in an unlikely way. I was 13 years old and the local paper was running an essay competition “Why my suburb is best” I entered and was very surprised to win, perhaps it was because I was  a kid that I won but anyway the prize was (in 1970) $25 worth of wallpaper from a store in the city. Luckily they recognised that as I was a child and we lived in a rental home wallpaper was not a great prize and allowed me to have a gift voucher instead.  Mum needed a new mixer at the time so my voucher was used to buy this little Sunbeam hand mixer. Seven years later, when I was married, mum gave it to me.

It still goes, it’s lost the caps off the end of the blades and is a bit sluggish but it goes; for how much longer I don’t know.

I still have my original electric frying pan although Hubby broke the Pyrex lid and I don’t really fry much these days.

I still have an iron that I was given as a wedding present. I was given two and kept both, when the first one died I started using the second one. They were both Sunbeam’s too. Of course I don’t iron a lot now but I’m starting to think about replacing it sometime.

On the other hand we’ve had three microwaves, at least three drip filter percolators, three fridges, three washing machines and two vacuum cleaners.

The first vacuum cleaner lasted from the late 70s to the early 2000’s. It was an Electrolux which I bought from “The Electrolux Man” who sold door to door. It didn’t fail, I replaced it twelve years ago because we had just bought a house full of carpet and I thought we needed a new one. I had been gradually eliminating carpet at the old place. I gave the old one to Hubby to use in his shed where it eventually packed up a couple of years later I think.

How about that! The ads were true!