HOT, crispy and sort of square, toast is a beautiful thing. Could this be the toaster that makes it even better?

They say death is the great leveller. King or tramp, lord or pauper, everyone is equal when they're lying in the ground. It's an interesting observation, but it's also morbid and depressing, so we like to run with a tastier alternative: toast. Because everyone likes toast. It's hot, it's crunchy, it's quick and it's so unfathomably easy to prepare you could make it in a jackknifing truck full of angry tigers. You simply can't go wrong with toast. Unless of course you specifically set out to do so.

Technology - our favourite cause here in the shed which became our prison many years ago - has kept apace with our love of toast by furnishing us with the toaster. It's a vertical grill in a box tailored to the act of heating bread, and it does its job well. We might very reasonably call it the second most important kitchen counter gadget after the kettle. Well done, toaster.

There are, as ever, niggles. Time is one: not even the toaster has the power to contract the fourth dimension, and so we must wait for two minutes, drooling as our horrible raw bread yums itself up into the glorious snack it was born to be. Blackness is another: every toast user in the world has known the tragedy of an overdone slice, dusty and bitter and barely fit for the bin, let alone the mouth. Grown men weep actual tears as they scrape their ruined slice over the sink, knowing the result will taste gruesome but too weakened to wait the 120 seconds required to prepare a fresh batch. And finally there's the popping mechanism, cause of many a broken heart as it fails to rescue a jammed fragment or, worse, elicits too much force and propels its delicious cargo out the window.

The Krups Brushed Stainless Metal Toaster with LCD Screen, besides being named by very sensible and literal minded people, tackles many of these issues. It tackles time admirably: incapable though it is of compressing two minutes into an instant, the eponymous LCD screen softens the blow by counting down the precious seconds until your snack is ready. And the screen also helps to combat blackness by giving you precise digital control over the cooking process. No longer will your ungainly labourer's hands be responsible for messing up the delicate balance of the analogue dial - instead your precise cooking requirements will be carried out by the unfeeling, cold evil of the robot toaster. And when the moment comes, your toast emerges proudly with a smooth, futuristic gliding motion befitting its majesty, quietly erasing the clumsy mechanisms of devices past from the kitchen history books. It's a fine machine designed for a noble task, and so we salute it.

Tragically, nobody has slid bread - or indeed any food - under the door of the shed for at least three months now, so we'll just have to play with the buttons and dream while we eat this wasp. It makes us happy to imagine how much you might enjoy it, though. Remember that when you think of us.