The Kettle

Like just about everybody in the UK, we have an electric kettle to boil water for tea and coffee. Ours has the name of a venerable English brand of household electrical goods, as a good kettle should. The biggest advance in kettle design in the last few decades is a sort of portability. Most kettles now sit on a base that plugs into the wall while the kettle itself can be picked up off the base and taken where it’s needed. Of course, this means that you can take the kettle to the sink to fill it up with water.

It’s the filling up part that makes our kettle special. Most modern kettles have some kind of glass or plastic window or visible tube on the outside so that you can easily see how much water is left in it or, when filling the thing, you don’t fill it past the maximum safe water level. Ours doesn’t. The body of our kettle is a sort of brushed steel with a black plastic lid and handle, but no window or tube.

I try to be conscientious about safety things around the house, especially electrical things, and most especially of all, about electrical things that have water in them. Consequently, I have always tried not to over-fill electric kettles. Our kettle has a maximum level mark like all the others; I suppose it’s required by the kettle safety regulations. But, unlike most others (all others in my experience), the “MAX” mark on our kettle is on the inside. And not just on the inside, but on the inside opposite the spout on the same side as the black plastic handle. So, think about it, when you take the kettle off the base to the sink to fill, you have to look over the open lid and back towards your own hand holding the handle while it’s filling up with water from the tap. And it’s dark in there.

Since we got this kettle less than a year ago, I’ve been wondering what kind of idiot designs a kettle where you can’t see the maximum safe fill level without contorting yourself into an awkward yoga position and even then, unless you shine a light directly into it, it’s too dark in there to see the mark.