In defence of the knife

Years ago, when I was a design student, we were given the task of
finding an object that spoke most strongly to us - our favourite
possession, really - and standing up and talking about it to the
class.Most people chose gewgaws, emotionally important things which
they'd carried with them for years.



I chose my kitchen knife.



As you might guess, brandishing a foot-long knife in front of a bunch
of people you've only known for a few weeks and saying "This is my
favourite possession" got something of an adverse reaction, and as a
result I had to work quite hard over the next few weeks to reassure
everyone that I wasn't some knife-wielding nutter. I wrote the
following little piece to explain - mostly to myself - what it was
about the knife that I admired and appreciated. The other day I came
across it again, and thought I'd share it with you.



The knife caused a lot of amusement
when it appeared. It is scary to have someone you're not entirely sure
of stand up with a knife and say 'this is my favourite posession'. The
answer I gave at the time was partial and incompletely considered, and
every time I see the knife now, I want to correct that.

Hence this document.

The reasons for my attachment to my kitchen knife begin with the Ocean Youth Club, where
I learned so many important lessons - to cook, to sail, and to accept
people. I learned there the benefits of having a sharp knife for
cooking, and that a blunt knife is much more dangerous than a sharp
one. I learned, too, that one sharp knife can be put to many uses - it
can crush garlic, shave cheese, open packets, stir things....
basically, only one tool is utterly, unquestionably vital in a kitchen,
and that is the knife. Everything else is optional. A sharp edge and a
fire - that's all you need to cook food.

I learned, too, that a sharp edge is the last resort in a wide range of
situations (not counting the diplomatic!). If a rope gets caught around
something (or someone), then a knife is the final solution when all
else has failed. A sharp edge can be used to wedge, to lever, to split,
to unscrew, to hold flat. The sharp edge is Man the Toolmaker's first
and final tool, the first mark of civilization and intelligence. It is
the last thing a person in the wild will do without, and the first
thing they will seek to reproduce. The knife, to the human race,
represents survival. It is the bottom line, the ur-tool, the first word
ever spoken in our lexicon of things. For that reason alone, it
deserves a special place in our consideration.

But there is more to the kitchen knife than simple age. Countless hands
have used it over the millenia, and the knife, perhaps more than any
other device in the object lexicon, shows evolution at work. Just as
nature has devised combinations both weird and wonderful, and also
elegant and simple, so the simple sharp edge lives with us now through
a million avatars. But perhaps the greatest miracle of all is this:
that each one, specialised as it might be for its own task,still
retains some of the versatility of that basic sharp edge. That is a
rare and wonderful thing, and is perhaps the best reason why any knife
should retain a special place in the materialist's pantheon.



So the knife is the ancestor, its sharp edge Eve to the Adam of the
blunt object. Its children have evolved and developed so that they fit
into many hands, performing wildly different tasks perfectly, yet still
retaining the flexibility of the original. So why, of all the knives in
Christendom, do I like my kitchen knife the best?

There are many answers, but the most fundamental are these: because it
is designed for cooking, and that is what I most often use knives for;
because it is very simple, and the qualities the knife embodies - age
and evolution - deserve simplicity; because its simplicity is made of
curves, and I like the way it looks. Because it fits my hand, because
it does its task well, and because of all my belongings, it has the
greatest chance of living to be as old as me. My knife embodies a
story, and that story is one of age and evolution, and ancestors in all
walks of life, from the cleaver in a West End restaurant to the swords
of the crusaders. It is the story of all human survival and all human
civilization.

That's why my knife is one of my possesions which speaks most strongly to me.