Knives out

If the media are to be believed, and why in the world should they not be? then before you read to the end of this sentence you will have stopped reading and taken a few moments out to stab someone.

Stabbing, it would appear, is this week’s Brexit, that is, a story that dominates the news, like pictures of Jordan falling out of nightclubs and her dress simultaneously used to dominate the red tops.

Now, let’s be quite, quite serious for a moment.  Stabbing is, by and large, a very bad thing.  The only people who have any business handling sharp things are surgeons (and even then, not always) and people opening boxes.  Also, anyone who has legitimate business handling a cutting tool.

You can usually tell people that actually need to use a knife, because they spend twenty to thirty quid more than they actually need to on the knife in question.  A fisherman will normally cut lines and gut fish with something called the ‘piscine plunger 8000’, which probably features an ergonomic grip and was ordered from a catalogue, not on line mind, a catalogue.  The fact that a kitchen knife from Wilkos, costing roughly £1.99, will do much the same job is an uncomfortable truth.

I myself own a knife, and am very pleased with it.  It’s a Swiss Army knife and it features two blades and a corkscrew.  It may will have other ingenious stuff tucked away in its chubby ruddy form, but so far I have only ever needed the two blades and the corkscrew.  The longer blade is used to open Amazon packages, the shorter blade is used to break the foil seal on wine bottles before the corkscrew is deployed.  To date, I have not had to plunge any of the aforementioned proddy tools into anything more exciting than a box of books, or a decent but competitively priced Zinfandel.

Which is why I read headlines about ‘Zombie Knives’ with such interest.  Presumably these are not knives that have been killed and then have risen from the dead.  This is a hard enough ask for something previously living, never mind an inanimate object, although it is cheering when my garden solar lights twinkle into life every spring after a winter of sullen darkness leads me to believe that this time they really are done.

Nor are they, presumably, knives that one uses on zombies.  Everyone who has made a close study of the undead horror genre knows that the best way to stop a zombie is blunt force trauma to the head.  Or to play ‘Thriller’ and make your escape while they get their groove on.

Are they, then, the tool of choice for the undead to open their Amazon deliveries?  Unlikely.  Again, close study of the genre demonstrates that zombies like to moan, shamble and tear things apart with their hands.  On taking delivery of, say, a box of much needed skin care products by Clarins, they would be more likely to rend the box than carefully insert the tip of the knife under flap A and then cut carefully along the dotted line.

Presumably then they are called Zombie Knives because the manufacturer thought that ‘Bloody Big Knife with a Nasty Jagged Edge’ was insufficiently catchy.  Looking at the fearsome pictures of these things, my main concern is that anyone in possession of such a thing is more likely to harm themselves than anyone else.

Indeed, a solution to this problem might be in plastic packaging.  Simply secure the blade in question inside a sufficiently robust plastic blister pack and any little ned with stabby ambitions is likely to be both frustrated and exhausted in attempting to open the thing.

So Zombie Knives are a thing, and one wonders how long it will be before vampire forks, werewolf can-openers and the like start to make an appearance.  Possibly the placing of scary words before an object is intended to make that object intimidating, in which case the makers of Monster Munch clearly did not get the memo, because that snack is just delicious even if the original 1970s pickled onion flavoured variety did render your breath an offensive weapon after consumption.