Tuesday 4 March 2008

Kitchen Confidential

My cottage is what estate agents used to call 'bijou'. Apart from certain crab-like manouevres required to go from room to room upstairs, living here means adopting a very ergonomically-led lifestyle. None more so than in the kitchen, where everything has to be neatly in its place, or I end up sliding fried eggs up off the floor and slicing bread on the gas hob. Imagine then my horror yesterday evening as I stood in my living room and heard a noise not unlike sixty tons of scrap metal being tipped-out of a lorry through my kitchen window. I didn't rush in, thinking I would be overwhelmed with old dustbins and iron bedsteads. I waited until the noise had subsided and then cautiously poked my head round the door. All that had happened is that my cooking utensils rack had decided to flee from the wall with the attendant noise that only colanders, seives, bottle openers and an Ikea alarm clock can make when hitting a table, floor, cooker and 'worktop'. Of course I put it all down to an aftershock of last week's earthquake, but my son-in-law tells me that my cast iron griddle and chestnut roaster positioned at one end, and the fact that I'd used entirely the wrong screws and rawlplugs, didn't help. Do you need to know all this? Probably not, but the resultant heap of shiny objects was somehow reminiscent of the poster, sans ashes and broken dolls, used for Len Deighton's book Bomber.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Camilla Jessop said...

What a delightful insight into your skills - and I'm sure I also recognise at least three IKEA cooking implements in the pile!

Having the right tool to hand is so important, and also having a good selection of them. It's why I have always made sure my rack is well held up.

Peter Ashley said...

IKEA was a great source of instant cheap stuff when I urgently needed to kit the kitchen out. I suspect a visit to the nearest cookshop is in order 'cos I've just noticed the thing (can't think of the right word) I use to get eggs out of the frying pan has a great big bend in it. Perhaps I'll sign it like Duchamp and flog it to Tate Modern as "Incident on the Way to Poitiers" or offer it as a substitute for the Smith & Wesson revolver on a re-issue of Deighton's Action Cook Book.

Toby Savage said...

You could always search ebay for replacements Peter..........

Fred Fibonacci said...

Tricky customer, the Rawlplug.

Ton Tom said...

That's all very well but you should have been brushing your teeth in preparation for your meeting, not taking photos of the washing up. I felt like a valid fellow blogger today because after visiting the Jaguar body builders adjacent to French Drove station (in your book) I purposely went north to Stamford just to buy a pork pie from Nelson's the butcher. Does that make me a member?

Peter Ashley said...

You know it does Tom, welcome aboard. Get blogging, pics of Jaguars and French canal barges particularly welcome.

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