My mum came back from the breakfast buffet a little confused. I do not recall her exact witty words but they must have included "bread in", "toaster", "contraption", "lost forever", "life of its own" "possibly automatically delivered to the table".

It was one of those Reith Hall-esque contraptions - indeed, not so much a toaster as a Bertha-inspired flame thrower. A brief description: A wire conveyor belt transports any unfortunate inputted items through a dark and mysterious toasting chamber, hopefully to be outputted abruptdely through some unknown orafice well out of sight of your hungry eyes. Ah, memories of bleary eyed students looking on nonplussed as their only meal of the working day disintegrates in cruels wisps of smoke, their only crimehaving been being a little too thickly sliced to make it out of said orafice.

I digress. The toaster in question was similar but different. For one thing it was even slower than Reith's.

"You'll be able to control the speed of it though" I said confidently, recalling Reith's toaster's three controls: conveyor speed, top hotness, and bottom hotness (some people like variety i guess. Note that there was no science to mastering the equilibrium of these three controls, indeed, I don't think there was even an art to it..)

My ma looked apologetic. "Umm.. No. There was one dial and that was set to 'toast' or something."
"What was the something?"
"...um... 'Shoes'."

So here you have it folks:

The bizarre love child of a toaster, an electronic shoes dispenser and one designer's sick mind. And perhaps my mother's tenuous grasp of Norwegian..