One of these was given reverential treatment in a picture by Pop artist Richard Hamilton

One of these was given reverential treatment in a picture by Pop artist Richard Hamilton. By the Sixties, the German electrical firm of Braun, the manufacturer with the best claim to have inherited the ethic and aesthetic of the Bauhaus, was producing superb, chaste toasters in cool stainless steel. An Alessi kettle says "I have money to boil"; a Dualit toaster says "I own an asparagus kettle and know how to use a mandolin." The Alessi customer wears Comme des Garcons; the Dualit buyer wears French gardening trousers.Toasters - a ten-second historyThe first generation of toasters to be self-consciously styled adopted the aesthetic of the American streamlined kitchen: big, plenty of chrome exuding a feeling of optimism, a bit like an Airstream trailer.This first generation of toasters did not comprise specially intelligent machines: the only feedback the user could expect was the bitter stench of burning But, naturally, evolution, occurred. Designed by Michael Graves, a professor of architecture at Princeton, cone-shaped and burnished with a bird in the end of its nozzle (singing kettle, what?). Or the fact that it is the most popular item on Heals wedding lists. It's for people who know a toaster is not just an appliance.Contrast it with other kitchen design statements - the Alessi kettle at pounds 86.50 for instance. Those with the six-slot model can look forward to eating their breakfast fill in the knowledge that if need be, it could produce two hundred slices an hour.

A six-slot chrome Dualit is one serious toaster. Who Dualites?The knowledge that the Conran Shop in South Kensington charges pounds 113.50 for the two-slot, pounds 154 for the four-slot, may give you some idea. It can accommodate bread as big as any Brit can confront (up four- and-three-quarter by five-and-a-half inches) and as thick as humans could desire. Putting the Dualit into action is like unleashing some primal industrial process: the thwunk of the lever as the raw bread descends, the clickety- click of the spring-loaded timer, the ticking noise as the toasting takes place. If the time to start making statements about yourself is at breakfast, the Dualit is the toaster for you.

It is rugged testimony to the owner's seriousness about cooking and about life. Big and handsome, it is manufactured by a catering equipment company in Brixton for hardpressed commercial kitchens where a hundred slices an hour is not out of the way. At parting she left Angelou with a two-edged prophecy: "You're going to be famous," she said. "But it won't be for singing."Taken from 'First Encounters', published by Knopf, New York.

On the last evening she was abusive to Guy; she accompanied Maya to the nightclub and shouted her off the stage Lady Day was some complicated woman. After dinner she sang him a good-night song - "You're My Thrill".Holiday spent five days with Angelou, and not until the end did she revert to her angry self. Holiday forgot that she couldn't stand children ("little crumb-crushers") and followed him out to water the lawn. She told him about all the low- down men she had known in her life, but she was careful to curb her profanity. Angelou admitted that she was.Guy, aged 12, came home from school He was introduced, and proved charming. But after lunch - fried chicken, rice, Arkansas gravy - Holiday softened Maya was a nice lady, and a good cook, too, she said When Wilkerson got up to leave, she opted to stay Angelou felt herself being watched "You a square, ain't you?" Holiday said. Then there was the flip side - the dark past, the time served, the long addictions to drugs and alcohol, all too apparent in the ravaged figure now walking in the door. At first Angelou found her guest hostile, her conversation a melee of sarcasm and obscenities.