I had a knife. It wasn't a simple piece of metal - it had a nicely sculpted handle with that horrible tactile silicone coating which gets gross and sticky over

I had a knife. It wasn't a simple piece of metal - it had a nicely sculpted handle with that horrible tactile silicone coating which gets gross and sticky over time and is really hard to clean (mild abrasive such as bicarbonate of soda will either clean it or remove it - and frankly I'm good with either outcome!) A few months back this knife fell to pieces when the handle split, causing the blade to do an interesting backflip maneouvre that I'd have preferred to spectate from much further away. While I'm ranting about kitchenwares, I'm getting tired of saucepans with a life expectancy of less than two years - they're another item I'd expect to last decades. But again the existence of the cheap crap makes it harder to find the better stuff, and certainly hard to have any confidence that what you're looking actually is any better, and not just the same crap with a higher price tag.