I have a friend who has a friend who has a breadmaker. And a coffee-maker. Both are set up on timers, to finish doing their baking and percolating when he gets up in the morning. And get this — he never eats the bread, or drinks the coffee. Never. Doesn’t even want to. He claims that he just likes the way they make his kitchen smell.

Why does mankind crave the gadget? What makes us yearn for items that we do not actually need? And, weirder still, what makes us envy people who have gadgets that we do not? Why do I even remember the bread-smell, coffee-smell man? Why does a part of me nod, grudgingly, in his direction, and view his morning routine with a degree of green admiration? I am a gadget freak. Self-confessed. At any point, I can check my e-mail with up to three separate items. From where I sit at my desk, I can reach a spare mobile phone, a plastic gun that fires suckers, a wind-up penguin, a super-fast guitar tuner and a magnetic dartboard. Many a reader will have read that list with a horrified pity. The true gadget freak will have read it and thought, “Damn, I really need a wind-up penguin.” My gadgets were bought to fill various aching voids. It must be months since I touched any of them.

I don’t have all the gadgets I could possibly want, but I do have a girlfriend and a bank manager. Without either, I fear I might topple into absurdity.

I think my gadget lust began, as a child, with the backs of cereal packets. Remember them? Collect 12 tokens and send off for a pen with a watch on it, or a whistle that only dogs could hear, or a super-thin magnet designed to get your keys out of drains. Allow 28 days for delivery. When you’re 7, such things are an almost unobtainable fantasy. It takes you one lifetime to collect the tokens, and those 28 days are another one. A super-thin magnet designed to get your keys out of drains, when you’re that age, is the sort of thing you can lie awake at night fantasising about. And, even then, you know you don’t need it.

You’re seven. It’ll be years until you even own keys.

Gadget lust isn’t the sort of lust you might feel for a big, shiny, red sports car. It’s the yearning for the Vespa, or the Brompton folding bike, rather than for the Ducati Monster. The whole point of gadgets is that we can pretend, pretend, that we want them for their utility. The ultimate gadget will, in certain circumstances, save you time. Possibly, those circumstances will never arrive. Possibly, you’ll never need to light a cigarette under water or shave in the dark or make a noise like a duck. But if you did, you could.

There’s a sense of empowerment in that. Fundamentally, you see, gadgets are all about control. They’re about knowing that, should we want bread and coffee any morning or should we want to tune a guitar in a hurry, we can.

The ultimate gadget freak is Batman. Spiderman can make webs, Superman can fly. Batman is just a guy, dressed as a bat. But he can climb a cliff any time, or hang-glide off a building. He can bring people down with boomerangs or summon his car with his wristwatch. It’s all down to gadgets. Batman is a gadget king. And I’d bet he can get keys out of drains as fast as anything.

KAMELEON 10-IN-1

REMOTE I actually own the earlier version of this, the old 4-in-1. We had a cable TV control, a video control, a DVD player control and a TV control, and life would have been just, y’know, better, if we only had the one. Instead of buttons this has a flat screen that lights up with symbols, thanks to a motion sensor, when you pick it up. Ours used to light up all the time, even when nobody moved at all. Either our motion sensor was oversensitive, or we have ghosts.

Kameleon 10-in-1 Remote Control, £99.98, available from stores nationwide, www.iwantoneofthose.com, 0870 4296000

WHIRLPOOL MUG

Just think of all that time and energy you waste every day stirring your own coffee. Hunting down a teaspoon, washing it, stirring too hard, too soft — hell, it’s a jungle out there.

With the whirlpool mug, all these worries are history. Just fill the cup with a drink of your choice, press the button on top of the handle and all your stirring needs will be instantly fulfilled. Reviews praise this gizmo for its smooth consistency, especially with milkshake.

Whirlpool mug, £9.99, www.iwantoneofthose.com, 0870 2411066

POKIA RETRO MOBILE

HANDSET You love your mobile phone, but you yearn for the days when the bit of a telephone that picked up your voice was actually where your mouth is, rather than up, counter-intuitively, by your ear. This retro handset plugs into your mobile phone, much like any other hands-free kit. Although it’s not, of course, hands-free. Now you can get that genuine 1950s phone box feeling, while walking down the road. People will stare, but only out of envy.

Pokia Retro Mobile Handset, £34.99, available from www.iwantoneofthose.com, 0870 2401109

CHAMP-EASY

This one is amazing. It’s actually useful. It’s a gizmo that opens champagne bottles — and it genuinely works. It takes closed bottles and makes them open. It really does. Granted, you don’t really need a gizmo to open champagne bottles. In fact, a champagne bottle is one of the few beverage-containing bottles that you can be 100 per cent confident of opening without any sort of opening device at all.

Still, champagne corks tend to fly about the place, don’t they? Very dangerous. With this, they don’t. And, well, it’s quite shiny. I want one.

Champ-Easy, £14.99, available from www.iwantoneofthose.com, 0870 2411066

ROCKET PEN

This is a pen that turns into a rocket but perhaps we are better off thinking of it as a rocket that also works as a pen. In fact, if getting a pen to travel large distances is your thing, you’d probably be better off just throwing it. Still, it’ll pass the time. Get one.

Rocket pen, £4.95, available from www.boysstuff.co.uk, 0870 7452000

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