In principle, I am not a big user of exclamation marks (I studied Dutch and learned that words should be strong enough to stand on their own and that using exclamation marks is a literary weakness), but in the case of the Quooker, I have dusted it off. Because guys, I am so happy with it. I wish I had had it fifteen years earlier. It would have saved me a Chinese course, I think, which I could have taken in the meantime. All those irritated minutes by the kettle. Just waiting and waiting and waiting.

The person you are meeting wishes for a cup of tea. That already costs you seven extra minutes, plus the time it takes to drink it. That’s tricky, you know, when you’ve only calculated half an hour for that appointment. But that all belongs to the past. I now make that tea in exactly two seconds. Or that water to boil my egg. It saves me an hour a day, at least.

Moreover, I went for the Hermès, so for the filtered-and-sparkling-water variant (my 6-year-old daughter seriously said after drinking her glass: “What a delicious water this is.”). Here speaks a happy housewife.

And if I really want that appointment to wobble again, I just throw an ice cube in his cup.