Hello world!

Welcome to what I hope will be the first of many blogs. Tis a lazy day although I’ve managed to write another scene in my vampire book, not bad when you manage 1200+ words before getting to work in the new kitchen after the dreaded council workmen have finished destroying and then rebuilding my kitchen. For the last few years I’ve been battling with a kitchen that saw me dragging washing baskets and bins out into the middle of the floor to fetch the electric wok or the George Foreman griller, or just to open the washing machine. Now for the first time in five years I have a kitchen that actually has a proper bench, just like normal folks, it has tiles on the wall, a space for my mini oven, a nice new sink, actual cupboards that don’t look like rejects from a Third World European reject shop. A floor, hey, the old floor was just dirty stained wood panelling hastily nailed down by a close relative to the Missing Link. I think it was wood from an old packing crate to be honest.

So last weekend I did partially move things back in, I have cupboard space for the electric wok, slow cooker, electric frypan and all the other bits and pieces. But I was left with a space in the middle of the bench that had been shelved so the mini oven went there with the microwave beneath it. But it meant my bench had a large empty space and I had nowhere to put the old BBQ table that once served as the old bench. I spent a productive two hours last week dismantling it, screwing the bench top onto the side and then sitting that on top of the empty space to extend the bench space all the way round. I was impressed with my ability to recycle old furniture. It was one skill I picked up from dad and it is a particular feature of Australian home life, utilise what you can and don’t throw it out unless you absolutely have no use for it. We used to break up old furniture and either make something new with it or use it to repair other furniture. Very rarely did we actually throw stuff out. Now that I live in Britain of course that skill hasn’t had much chance to be exercised so I was pretty impressed with my new fold up bench. The weight of the bench top means that gravity holds it hard against the tiled wall.

So today I’ve finished off in the kitchen, put my pictures back up and tidied up. I’ve decided it’s time to start cooking decent meals instead of the usual tv dinners and microwaved pizzas. That was excusable when I had to drag crap out to get to other crap, so   that I could just cook, but now I’ve got a place for everything it’s time to cook real meals. And I can cook! I remember back in the ’70s before that cancer of political correctness took hold of society. We used to have home economics classes, which were cooking classes, mostly they were filled with girls but for a year I did home economics along with the typing class. Back then I think it was just called typing, we had mechanical typewriters and we had to learn to touch type. I’m grateful for those two subjects these days. You’d never get away with it now in a PC crazed world.

Advertisement