You only live once and once is enough if you do it right. I told myself this the other morning as I decided to have a piece of toast with orange marmalade because when I warmed up my coffee and put the milk carton back in the fridge, there was the marmalade looking at me, a high-grade marmalade as I could see by the fact it had a French name and had bits of citrus in it and I reached for it thanks to fond associations going back to my childhood. Grandpa was from the tenements of Glasgow and for him orange marmalade was a luxury of the privileged classes and so eating it was to rise above your assigned station in life if only for a few minutes.

I put the bread in the toaster and now I wonder who invented this fabulous little ordinary machine so I google it and the toaster, it turns out, was developed in stages by several men between 1893 and 1919 when a Minnesotan named Charles Strite came up with the pop-up toaster. And so the toast pops up and I butter it and spread marmalade on it, not Walmart marmalade but imported, such as royalty would expect to be served at Windsor Castle, and instantly, my day brightens.