Sunday Bloody Sunday
I have experienced two movie moments where the audience reaction has been so startling that I can’t think of the movie without first remembering the moment.
Immediately after the big shock in the 1967 Audrey Hepburn film “Wait Until Dark” the lights seemed to go up in the cinema. It wasn’t; it was a thousand cigarettes being lit simultaneously to recover from the shock. An illuminating experience.
The other was in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” when Glenda Jackson, short of time having overslept, fills her mug and tea bag from the hot tap in the sink. The entire theatre went “BLEAGH!”
I was reminded of that scene when I saw an ad for a product called the Quooker. It’s an additional hot tap, delivering instant boiling water.
After overcoming my initial revulsion, I read that it can save up to 55% of the cost of boiling a kettle.
Now saving money has an atavistic appeal for me (there’s some Cardi in my Welsh ancestry) so I looked further into this. It costs about a penny to boil 1.5 pints of water, so if the Quooker saves half that (always remember that “up to” actually means “less than”) that’s 0.5p I’ll have saved every time I boil a kettle.
This is something I do four times a day. That would be 2p saved per day. And as the only possible Quooker for me is the one with the Heritage tap in a brass finish and the high capacity tank, a mere bauble for £1,305, I’ll have saved enough to cover the cost in only 1,787 years.
But hey — it might just be worth it, to see people’s faces when I hand them a mug of instant after filling it up from the hot tap.