Spooning this out: Lon Gibbons knows the gubbins when it comes to coffee and the stirring of it. Indeed, what Lon doesn't know about making a latte isn't worth a lotty.

Death of the teaspoon.

As the last teaspoon in Britain is melted down, Lon Gibbons finds out why.

The teaspoon, longstanding short-handled stalwart and companion to the quintessential English hot beverage tea is to be phased out, or so they say.

It appears that the teaspoon isn’t as much “now” as it once was “then” and the fashionable new drink of today, coffee, has recently overtaken the tea market of yesteryear on the inside leg, making all things tea-associated out-moded and totally defunct.

Teaspoons, which have been around, until just recently, since the English invented the fragrant refreshment in the 1920’s, have always been the perfect companion with which to stir the milk into that leafy drink. But the recent influence of so-called US “culture” to our once hallowed high streets means that coffee houses have been replacing tea-rooms like hot cakes replacing cold ones.

Ground coffee beans and the drink made out of them are all the rage these days and with coffee drinks come coffeespoons, with which to stir in horrid frothy milk.

Already coffee houses across the country are complaining that they haven’t enough coffeespoons to go around and it seems there’s only one solution to that problem: melt down the now unused teaspoons and make them into coffee spoons, that’s what.