I've just realised that a fiendish plot has gone on right under my nose. So fiendish that I can hardly believe it, but then I should have known you can never trust electrical goods makers. Just when we thought we could kiss goodbye forever to the electric sandwich maker, they've gone and remarketed it, put it in new packaging and renamed it. Poor housewives all over the country are being fooled, with nothing they can do about it. Even the Trading Standards Office won't be able to help, it's so darned clever. Now we all remember the sandwich toaster, don't we? Sometime in the 1960s a very fiendishly clever electrical goods maker realised that if he – I can't think it could possibly be a woman – invented a piece of machinery which would hold two pieces of bread with a filling inserted and then brown it on both sides at once he could call it a toasted sandwich machine and do away with grilled cheese on toast and the toasting fork all in one go. So he did, and his marketing people did well to persuade people that small triangles of toasted bread were fun, fun, fun. The things walked out of the shops almost by themselves. Maybe in some gleaming kitchen, with someone around to do the washing up, the prototype seemed perfect. In the kitchen, however, we gullible people soon found that it wasn't. For a start, it shouldn't be called a toasted sandwich maker, it should be called a toasted cheese sandwich maker because without cheese it is really very boring. Cheese melts, and lubricates any other added ingredients. No cheese and you have just a boring old bit of toast with dry stuff in the middle. A ham toasted sandwich was not a happy experience. Then there is the fact that with cheese a toasted sandwich can be a dangerous object should an innocent little mouth bite into it without waiting the required ten minutes for the molten cheese to cool down. Children were the main victims, impatient as always, they never listed to the scream of 'don't eat it yet' by the person who would then have to deal with severely scalded tongue after eating a sandwich which bit back. Then we have the fact that whereas a plain cheese sandwich with perhaps a bit of tomato or onion, is quite a nice substantial snack, served with what catering people like to call a 'salad garnish' but which we plain folk call 'not a lot of salad for the money'. Somehow, serve the same thing toasted and it shrank to four little mouthfuls. Many was the occasion when you handed over money in a pub for a toasted cheese sandwhich and realised you were paying something like 50p a bite and were still starving. And, finally, there was the cleaning. No matter how careful you were, some of the melted cheese escaped and got into the hinges of the machine and proved almost impossible to clean. If you cleaned it immediately you got burnt, if you left it the cheese dried like concrete. Soon your toasted sandwich maker looked like it had a fringe on top, a lace-effect of bits of very over-toasted cheese hanging out the back. So it got relegated to the back of the larder, then the shelf where other equally annoying machines go and then the elephant's graveyard of all impossible electrical items, the garage, where few would ever see it again. On a few occasions people who had just come home from the pub demanded a toasted cheese sandwich, probably out of slightly inebriated nostalgia. People who have just come home from the pub will eat anything however disgusting – pickled eggs, pickled onions, jars of red cabbage in vinegar, rice crackers with a well past sell-by date. Old curry. A toasted cheese sandwich from a slightly cobwebby machine is not challenge to them. At various intervals manufacturers tried to rekindle interest in the machines. One, having realised the dryness of a bit of ham in two slices of unbuttered toast, suggested buttering the bread on the outside as well, to make a nice crispy buttery exterior. More work for the cleaner. Then there were the fun shapes. We have one shaped like a pig which is still a pig to clean. 'Look kiddies, a toasted sarny maker shaped like a pig, your mum will love it.' Not! Now, just as I thought we had seen the last of the infernal machine it's here again. In disguise. Oh, I'm just as much of a sucker as anyone else when it comes to buying machines. Hence the smoothie machine. Or rather the liquidiser which is posing under a new name. A liquidiser whooshes up disgusting creations made of banana, kiwi fruit, strawberries and ice cream. A smoothie maker shooshes up disgusting creations made of banana, kiwi fruit, strawberries and ice cream. The only difference is that the smoothie maker comes with a nicely illustrated booklet outlining many different disgusting creations, just like the original toasted sandwich maker came with recipes for inventive sandwiches like peanut butter and carrot, hideous when cold, even more hideous when heating to 110 degrees. On this occasion I wasn't the sucker who was fooled, although I might have been had I seen it when not in full control of my senses. No, it wasn't me, but there on the counter when I came home one day was a bright, shiny new machine. About the size of a laptop computer although slightly thicker, it was, it said, a panini press. NO IT'S NOT, IT'S A TOASTED SANDWICH MAKER! 'No it isn't,' said my daughter crossly, stroking her new aquisition. 'It's a panini press, not the same thing at all.' 'Look,' I said, 'you put two pices of bread in it with something in the middle, then you put the lid down and in next to no time you have a toasted item, hot interior, crisp exterior, flattened to within an inch of its life.' IT'S A TOSTED SANDWICH MAKER! 'It's not,' she said even more crossly. 'It takes different shapes of bread.' 'It still toasts them,' I said. 'It still needs cheese to make the sandwiches edible and the cheese still leaks out all over the machine. 'Just because it's called a panini press and it takes diffferent sizes of bread doesn't mean it isn't a toasted sandwich maker which makes squashed sandwiches.' 'Paninis are not sandwiches, they're Italian... ,' she started to say. I gave up. I didn't bother to explain that I know what paninis are. They're Italian toasted sandwiches and usually cost around £1.99 more than the equivalent non- toasted white bread with filling sort of sandwiches because they've had a bit of heat applied to them. People like asking for them because it sounds foreign and fancy, just like people who just love cafe latte because it sounds upmarket, unlike coffee with milk and froth. I give up. I'll clear a space in the garage for the panini press to live out its life next to George's grill, the smoothie maker and the steamer which steams all the taste out of vegetables so you might as well drink the steam water. To say nothing of Jamie Oliver's salad dressing shaker gadget, which, with due deference to Jamie, is fine if you have biceps like a gorilla but not very good for us dainty ladies. But I'm on the watch out for the next cunning trick by electrical goods manufacturers – no-one's going to fool me with a former chip maker by calling it a home Tandoori oven!