THE must have gadget of the 1980s home is hoping to reclaim its prestigious place on the kitchen counter. By dressing up as a penguin.

Soda Stream - the kitchen item that divided the haves from the have nots. Back in the previous millennium when we were all young and spritely, owning a Soda Stream was two steps short of being the Queen. This incredible device placed the power of a major drinks company in the hands of the hoi polloi, enabling the common housewife to create sweet carbonated beverages at the flick of a switch instead of having to buy them from the shop. It was nothing short of a home revolution, rivalled in magnitude and scope only by the electric bread knife.

These days, of course, there is no such thing as housewives. Women today balance the demands of childraising with high flying executive jobs that involve putting on sexy glasses, having strong, healthy hair and getting out of helicopters on rooftops to have meetings about stocks and shares. Their other halves, meanwhile, are the very same people who grew up enthralled by Soda Streams, but whose love of homemade fizzy drinks has been tragically usurped by a passion for plasma screens and cocaine.

Faced with these market changes, how could Soda Stream convince today's consumers to buy back into the dream? Simple: penguins! Everybody loves penguins. So the new, high end Soda Stream Penguin looks like a posh robot penguin. Like all robot penguins, it's indispensable at dinner parties, thereby making it an essential purchase for the modern career woman who regularly holds such events. Men, meanwhile, will like it again for exactly the same reason they liked it as children - it makes things go fizzy when they push a button. Only now it looks slightly like a penguin instead of something they found in Oxfam.

What's more, the Soda Stream Penguin can make normal water fizzy, which is great news for absolutely everybody now that water's very important to drink a lot of. Or why not try using it on the following things?

Tea - piping hot bubbly tea, the perfect way to perk yourself up after a hard day's shop
Eggs - carbonate your omelette just like they do in France
Water - or just drink directly from the loo like a normal person
Mercury - be the envy of all your neighbours with homemade fizzy metal
Paint - why not?