Mortar Combat

I admit it. I am an avid cook, but I do not own a pepper mill. I've bought several over the years, and they were each as flimsy a piece of equipment as I have ever seen. Most broke within a month, the most memorable being my last purchase, which cracked on the third use. Needless to say, I have grown rather disenchanted with pepper mills and have lately resorted to grinding pepper in my massive granite mortar and pestle. I have yet to meet the spice that could stand up to that. I swear I could grind quartz into a fine powder in this thing. Not that I would, but you know what I mean. Anyway, this is not an ideal situation. I have been seeking a solution.

Yesterday, I was bouncing back and forth between the Bliss UK and Bliss US sites, wondering why America deserved only Nigella's cookware line (lovely and orbular though it is. Salt Pig - mmm.) yet the British have things like this:

I saw the ceramic hand on a design site a few days ago (Apartment Therapy? I can't remember. It was in a bathroom, for holding bracelets), and was trying to source it, though I'm not sure that the $60+ it would cost to get it here is ready to leap from my wallet just yet. But I did find this: Oliver Hemming's Spice Boy. And, as it happens, Unica Home has sweetly provided an American distribution point, so that I can ignore the dollar's pathetic slouch next to the British pound. And they have it in blue!