A judge has called for a drastic rethink on the way we use knives in kitchens in a bid to reduce the number of young men dying on our streets because of knife crime.
And he has come up with an idea for a scheme that could be rolled out across the UK where members of the public could take their kitchen knives to be ‘modified’ and the points ground down into rounded ends.

Judge calls for 10in pointed kitchen knives to be ground down to a rounded end

This article reflecting another idiocy coming out of the Less-Than-Great Britain reminded me of “El Afilador.” Back when I lived South of the Caribbean,  there was this guy in a moped with a grinder attached to the back who would drive around announcing himself as a door to door knife sharpener. He used a pan flute and simply played a scale up and down. Wives would come out with their knives and he would sharpen them back to cutting life for a few coins.  We never used him because my dad had a talent for sharpening that was almost scary, but the sound of the pan flute was forever associated with the sharpening guy, “el Afilador.”

Decades later, we moved to South Florida and it shocked the heck out of me to hear the same scales played in a pan flute and lo and behold, it was a sharpening guy, Cuban-American style.

With the advent of cheap cutlery and basic tools to do sharpening at home, the tradition of El Afilador is not doing very well but maybe we can breathe new air by sending them to London and instead of offering their trade to bring back to life pointy sharp kitchen utensils, they can make a pound or two rendering blunt and “safe.”  Of course, they would have to be renamed “El Des-Afilador” to be true to their new nature.