The Bunnings Knife Block Set

The Bunnings Knife Block Set was this years present. Unannounced by postcard as the game set had been, it came, and within a week we were all owners of this new culinary tool. To me these things seem like over kill but the only thing I’ve ever cooked is coffee so I accept I’m not qualified judge. Dangerous is the other thing I think of them. Others agree. One of a group of our night fill Sherpas took his out to examine it on that nights eleven forty to Seven Hills. The guard who stumbled onto this display made quite a fuss and demanded its confiscation until our lad’s brown skinned brothers in arms, attempting to resolve the confusion, produced their own gifts and the guard finding himself surrounded by armed Ghurkhas wished them a merry Christmas and wisely retreated.

You may empathise with me in the conflict I feel passing this windfall on to those nearest and dearest to me. Obviously I find no use for a knife block when it comes to making coffee so it fails my first test of a gift; that it be something that I would like myself. Unwanted / unneeded / undesired, I look to find those who may fill at least one of these aspirations. I dismiss E-Bay, it doesn’t seem right for the Life Line bin or the local busker. No the obvious beneficiaries would have to be Alice and Jack. No possibility of garlanding myself as ‘world’s most generous dad’ either as Bunnings had taken the precaution of branding the block and sand blasting individual knives with their logo. The best result of this could come years hence when mint condition blocks, cardboard packaging included, might gain value in the limited edition vintage market.

The word limited here raises more questions. No yet devised inquiry via Google to Bunnings will divulge the number of employees who would have received this largesse. It must though count in the hundreds of thousands, just look at their ad. I noticed a similar discount price for a Whiltshire Block in today’s paper of $112.00. This would put the cost retail of these blocks at the least at hundreds of hundred thousand dollars and by extrapolation the cost trade at about half that enormous sum. Who would have paid this price? Bunnings would like us to believe that they did but the cynic in me sees them demanding from their Chinese supplier, who profits from much more than knife blocks, a ridiculously low price that they provide by ever more taxing demands on their under age and helpless battery hen like labour force.

Ah yes! So many questions about so simple a gift and I still haven’t indulged my underlying misgivings about the danger. In fact some of you may have noticed how I keep dodging this inevitable tract. The pen is mightier than the sword in the broad sense but in the domestic, well I’m afraid the deepest cuts still come from the sword. Oh I’ve indulged in school boy games that saw us break the longer point from an old fashion dip pen nib to create a very accurate two prong dart that could be propelled by elastic band to embedment in the ceiling. This activity paled then and now in comparison to what could be achieved by a full set of butchers knives. The butcher had a chain mail glove. What mayhem might be unleashed innocently, let alone maliciously, by another hundred thousand such sets in amateur public circulation.

Domestic violence, an even greater killer than war or traffic carnage, probably both, is dominated the world over by knives. Certainly in the USA and other Balkan like states where guns are prolific many homicides are gun driven but even there the knife has the sharp edge of the domestic market.

Now it’s always been my belief that if you anticipate the disaster it will not come to fruition. Yes sounds silly but I firmly believe that if whenever you take off, or drive off, you think what disasters might prevail, they won’t. Works for me OK. Anyway this is the light in which I would like you to view this diatribe. I like a Jack with all his digits attached. I like an unscarred Alice. I like both of these much more than a full set of butchers knives in every home, an aspiration that would have been difficult to sell to any previous generation, and that I hope will remain sales resistant in the future despite the wiles of marketers such as Bunnings.