Design wobble ... Qantas's wonky childrens' cutlery
My daughter Daisy is only three years old but she is already a veteran of three long-haul flights Down Under. Along the way, she has collected countless boxes of crayons, a cache of colouring-in books, a Snoopy, two Spongebob Squarepants and a fluffy Singapore Airlines 747 for each leg of a return flight to Sydney. We've learnt the hard way that the airline industry's answer to fidgety kids is a soft toy, a four-page activity book and Shrek 3 on the On Demand entertainment console.
Our last flight back to Australia was over Christmas. We flew with Qantas, so I visited the "Flying With Us" section of their website to see what they had in store for Daisy. It promised a range of activities to keep her entertained and enhance her "travel experience" and, for a moment, we considered leaving the small library of books and mini-chest full of plastic toys we always travel with at home.
Daisy got a Freddo Frog-shaped pencil case that contained pencils and an activity book but not a chocolate frog. And a set of the most extraordinarily useless set of children's cutlery I have ever seen.
Daisy was handed her first set of cutlery somewhere over the Southern Caucasus. At first I thought the blobs of twisted, brightly-coloured plastic had been pulled from a house fire. The flight attendant assured me they were meant to look that way.
"It's Wiggles cutlery," she said.
The Wiggles are children's entertainers who hang out with a dinosaur called Dorothy and sing songs about hot potatoes. Let me just say that as cutlery designers, the Wiggles make very good singers.
The blue knife was s-shaped with the serrated bits on the least useful sides of the bends. The prongs of the yellow fork looked like Alf-Inge Haalan's legs after Roy Keane had tackled him. And the red spoon was shaped in a way that once you got it into a young mouth it was almost impossible to pull out. In short, it was sort of cutlery you'd expect from men who make their living dressed in brightly-coloured polo necks singing nursery rhymes.
It was only when Daisy lifted the aluminium lid covering her meal to reveal four brussel sprouts sitting on a bed of pasta that the cutlery made sense. Qantas wasn't expecting kids to eat the food they were serving them - no one would. The cutlery was just another toy for the kids to play with.
The s-bend in the knife blade stopped it from going too far up young nostrils. The kink in the spoon was perfect for scooping out peas wedged between seats. And the bent prongs on the fork ensured no lasting damage when it was plunged into the scalp of the passenger sitting in front.
As ingenious as the cutlery was, the kids on our flight soon lost interest in poking, scooping and jabbing. By Azerbaijan they were wailing for the Freddo Frog they expected to find in the pencil case.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
