Aussie,
I remember back in my early days as an apprentice electrician at the Power Board, one of the jobs was to make the tea (for some strange reason no-one drank coffee back then).
You had to boil the kettle (jug, in your language), it was one that didn't turn itself off, you had to unplug it at the kettle, because the plug at the wall used to get too hot to touch, ( yeah, all this in a Power Board building).
You had to warm the pot and then put the tea leaves (no tea bags back then) in and the water and let the tea "draw".
Milk and sugar in the cups (I was once told off one day by an old Inspector for getting it around the wrong way)
and then pour this filthy looking brew into the cups, no tea strainer either.
Years later, after the old guard had more or less retired,
we threw out an old toaster like you described above, Aussie, it had more joints in the flex than actual real cord, at one time it would have been chromed but it had been overheated and thrown in the nearby sink so many times, it looked more like an old lady's hand-bag with a "cord" on it.
This was of course before we had anything remotely like smoke detectors.
