No, really. I have a pretty good track record of getting the neat gadgets about 6 months before everyone else; it’s kinda weird, and I am certainly not setting trends – in fact I am rarely the first to try sometihng since I usually pick stuff up off friends – but something must peg my “niftyness” detector just a touch before everyone else coz I generally pick the good stuff.

Plus “disposable income and no kids”, helps.

So, historically:

• One moment you are exploring Lidl and finding it really is much better than you thought, then six months later it’s all over the trendy mags.
• I was shopping at M&S a year before their stock price climbed out of the sewer, because I found they were suddenly stocking stuff in my size. I should have bought shares, too
• “Alec, why are you buying a folding bicycle?”
• I wanted a R1200GS three years before Boorman and McGregor made them sexy.
• “Didn’t you hear the iBook runs BSD now?”
• “It’s called a Palmpilot…”
• “It’s called Linux…”
• “It’s called a Web Browser…”
• “Alec, why (and how) are you forwarding summaries of your e-mail, to your pager?”

So let’s try wagging the dog for once: a couple of months ago I helped Adriana and Perry buy a slicer – spending other peoples’ money is so much fun – and I have since purchased the same one for myself this week, and already one of my colleagues (hello, Darren) wants to take a look…

The reason? Simple. You can buy big salamis and cured meats for trade prices, slice them as thin as you choose, and save a bundle. You can slice cooked and cured meat, vegetables, all manner of stuff. If you’re obsessive-compulsive then you can cut your bread to exactly 12.5mm thick, which is incredible fun.

Er, yeah.

The one we went for was the Graef Tendenza T5 which costs 99 quid, you can buy it from Amazon UK but if you go to the vendor direct you will save 5 quid postage.

The translation from German is charming:

The Tendenza T5 offers a solid and robust stand due to their stand-alone feets. The carriage guarantees a flexible handling for every kind of slicing good.

(my emphasis) which adds a dash of humour to the device, with its “stand-alone feets” and big red knob – but browsing the Amazon DE page using Google Translation suggests we’ve lucked out with the manufacturer, they seem to have a good reputation, and the all-metal construction is easy to clean.

No I am not going to use it every day, but maybe once or twice a week to lay out a bunch of coldcuts for nibbling; also the best bacon sarnies are to be had by feeding a loaf of bread sideways through a slicer, so you can have foot-long bacon sandwiches.

There’s a whole new set of possibilities, which ever way you slice it.