Here I am, yet again, thinking about air fryers and pondering how they have managed to permeate the collective consciousness to become so highly coveted, with it estimated that almost half of all UK households now own one.

The author and TV presenter Richard Osman recently posted on X (formerly Twitter): “There are currently 7 books in the UK top 20 about cooking with air fryers. I'll tell you this for nothing, Joyce is going to get an air fryer in the next Thursday Murder Club book.”

He makes an excellent point. It really is quite something. I can’t remember ever giving this much thought to the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine circa the late 1990s and early 2000s, or the vegetable spiralizers that were all the rage through the mid-2010s.

Possibly the last gadget to have lived this rent-free in my head was the hallowed SodaStream in the 1980s.

To be honest, though, I thought we had hit peak air fryer yonks ago. They feel a bit, well, 2022? By this stage, I imagined we would have moved........

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