Over the last few years the spousal unit has somehow become The Teapot Terminator and I'm sad to report that yesterday saw yet another change in the teapot regime here.

As my three loyal readers know, one of the great pleasures of my life is a cup of tea. For years and years we poured those cups of tea out of The Best Teapot In The World, but then one day the spousal unit dropped it.

One moment it was a lighthearted bit of crockery able to sing:

I'm a little teapot short and stout
Here is my handle
Here is my spout

And the next moment it was a bitter, broken shell of a pot, mumbling incoherently about how cold a world it is when you lose your spout.

I really did not know what a curse had befallen me. Blithely I walked into the nearest store and bought a replacement teapot figuring a teapot is a teapot is a teapot. You can well imagine my horror when I got it home and found that in the years since I'd last bought a teapot some sort of insanity had gripped the world of teapot design and now all new inexpensive teapots came with built in Dribble Technology.

It seemed that only if I was willing to pay in the range of $50 or $60 Canadian (Canadian dollars being worth only slightly more than Monopoly money, of course) could I own a teapot that didn't drip when it poured.

Cheapskate Thrifty shopper than I am, I balked at that kind of money and promptly began an exploration of second hand shops, hoping to find pots that had been made before the advent of the Dribble Technology Madness.

You can well imagine how bemused their proprietors were when I would ask them if I could take their teapots into the shop bathroom to test them out for Dribble Technology. I didn't care. I Was A Woman On A Mission.

I managed to find two dribble free teapots on my own and the lovely Kaffeine even took pity on me and gave me one from her teapot stash.

In the last two years the spousal unit has managed to inflict enough damage on them all that they have had to go to the Big Pottery Barn In The Sky.

During my last visit to Montreal the daughter and I visited a tea shop and in amongst all the extremely beautiful and heartbreakingly fragile teapots that lined its shelves I Saw The Answer To My Prayers. Gingerly I picked it up. Solid. Very Solid. I lifted the lid to find that it had a beautiful stainless basket inside for steeping my loose teas.

We were in Westmount, one of the toniest sections of Montreal. When I gingerly asked the salesperson if I could test the teapot I expected to be laughed out of the store. Instead, I was pointed towards a special sink right beside the counter. I could have wept with joy right there. I Was Not Alone. Others had felt the pain of Dribble Technology.

I filled the pot with water, poured and ... and ... and it performed flawlessly. I kept tipping and pouring it, while making soft babbling sounds of happiness because it was just such a marvel to see a teapot do what a teapot should do.

The best part of all? My new teapot is The Superman of Teapots, a veritable Man of Steel.