Lovables

The electric kettle's on/off switch became intermittent. Once we'd have lived with it until it failed completely but those genteel poverty days are over now. The measuring tube on the side of new kettle lights up blue ("Like a disco," says Professional Bleeder). This seems unnecessary – a feature that is likely to fail first and turn the kettle into junk. Twenty-first century deception.

The previous kettle (on the right) lasted years perhaps decades but there was no sentimental attachment. How is it some devices come to be loved?

● VR's Prestige knife, bought 58 years ago, serrated edge long since departed; now more a weapon then a utensil. Years ago VR cut tip of her finger off with it. Might that be the emotional tie?

● Panasonic microwave has endured almost twenty-five years. Heavily made, dull brown, reliable. Seeing that go would cause a pang.

● Also heavily made, Sellotape (US: Scotch tape) dispenser allows you to tear off strips with one hand. Bought specially for me. Literally indispensable.

● Amtico floor tiles in kitchen. Cost a fortune (£1600 in 2003) but still good as new. Rare case of opting for top of  range.

● Neff oven and glass hob. Also top of range. Previously preached about on Tone Deaf.

● Brabantia touch bin. Touch top, bin opens - a gimmick? Nah. Hands full of nasty rubbish? Use your elbow. Lasted more than ten years.

● Plastic vegetable strainer. Lightweight, indestructible. Came free as Persil promotion, mid 1960s.

● Plastic pineapple corer. Lakeland. Twenty years-plus. £4? Does exactly what it claims to do – though unexpectedly.

RR as chef: a brief life

VR retired two years after I did. I occupied myself in the empty house writing freelance articles and preparing evening meals for the five days of the working week. Ironically the freelance work became financially, if not intellectually, successful but even the extra £12,000 a year it brought in wasn't sufficient encouragement to keep going into old age. I turned to fiction from which I haven't made a penny.

That left the kitchen. You'll notice I say "preparing evening meals", I don't say "cooking". That doesn't mean I heated a Tesco's made-up cottage pie, only that my work in the kitchen was perfunctory, rigid and dismissive. My repertory consisted of fifteen predictable dishes (fish pie, lasagne, vegetable soup, macaroni cheese, meat loaf, eggs mornay, etc) all created from scratch and repeated twice a month.

Did I risk boring my wife to death at the table? No sir! She maintains neither the limited range nor my lack of imagination mattered a scrap. The fact that someone other than she was producing dinner was all that counted.

My view is I "assembled" these dishes, I didn't "cook" them. In cooking, constituents change radically, a cake being the obvious example. Cooking also involves risk. One assembles  bolognese sauce, one (riskily) cooks hollandaise sauce. The nearest I came to cooking was putting together béchamel (Or was it the preliminary roux?) that is the basis of the white stuff in lasagne and fish pie.

I look back on this period of my life as faintly heroic, outside established norms. VR regards it wistfully, wishing I’d resume. If pressed hard enough I agree to lunch out.

Most men have never made béchamel/roux and I enjoy the sense of exclusivity. Male achievement is not confined to hairy-chests or self-indulgent work with spanners.

Time out of joint

These days I'm mostly comatose; I posted glowingly about our new duvets, implying sleep was better than sonatas. But more recently catatony (I doubt the word exists, but I'm getting lazy) has been replaced by upheaval; 'tis the Ides of March, otherwise the Borderlines Film Festival.

Yesterday I saw Marguerite, a French movie about a wealthy woman who sings publicly despite having a tin ear. It's subtler than that might suggest; her fellow charity workers ask: should one tell her or not? But what about me? I can afford my singing lessons. Is there a world out there governed by politeness? Saying: nah, leave the old geezer be, the grave will soon silence him for good.

More disruption at home. For dessert I had a cake in which flour had been replaced by clementines (tiny oranges) boiled for ages and mushified in the food processor. The texture was fine but not solid, the flavour pleasingly tart. Slightly weird.

Plus those strange orders on my computer: Top op anardana seeds, Natco ajwain seeds, Amchoor powder.

Like Marguerite they're part of the Borderlines whirlwind.  Ian, our grandson, comes for the movies and to dominate our large and fully equipped kitchen. Ian is an "adventurous" cook and VR is briefly reduced to sous-chef. Soon we'll discover what Ian needs those powders for.

Ian causes me to stir my stumps. On free evenings I pour him glasses of champagne. Yesterday we got into the car and took him up the Elan Valley where gale-force winds blew spume off the huge reservoirs (see pics) and we found him a café where they served faggots (Note to US readers: check your dictionary before making an erroneous assumption.)

Borderlines: the eye of the storm.

The fairies just flew in

One of the mainly unnoticed miracles that happens in the Robinson kitchen a couple of times a week: here the creation of fairy cakes. But on this occasion it was the speed that was remarkable.

VR arrived home at about 12.45 from having her hair done. Realised she hadn't bought cakes to go with the lunchtime coffee. At 12.54 she'd assembled the constituents (It wasn't a kit) and by 13.13 was eating the first one.

Actually I'm a bit slick myself. I did this post, including writing the stuff, cropping the pix and doing a six-part Photoshop Photomerge in 25 minutes. We may be old but we can move when it's in our interest to do so.

Stuff your ears, I'm ranting

You have the perfect draining rack? Fibber!

Unless you had it made specially and even then I doubt you.

No kitchen device faces so many conflicting demands, even when you reduce the crockery range to an artificially minimal three: cups (or mugs), side plates, dinner plates.

Take those slots. Plates are thinnish, right? Surely 7 mm is enough? Wrong! Dinner plates have ridges underneath and you need about 12 mm. So, fewer dinner plates can be stored and – worse – the side plates drop through. Then there are plate diameters. The stainless steel rack (above) was bought believing that simpler would be better. But the splayed angle is insufficient to support dinner plates.

Cups/mugs. Four will eat up all your rack space. So add another level (see the white rack). Alas! I notice VR removes her bone-china mug when she sees it on the upper level and surreptitiously dries it with a tea towel. I could go on. But it gets much worse when we consider bowls.

Talk not about dish-washers. Their owners are zealots, ideologues and pedants, quite capable of running blogs entirely devoted to this subject.

BOOKMARKS Both of us use ABE books and VR reads about four library books a week. Thus we are in receipt of lots of un-chosen bookmarks. Some of dubious taste although I hasten to say this doesn’t include Joe né Plutarch’s patented and self-decorated markers, much appreciated.
 

Dubious taste? Surely I’m a grievous offender myself and am disqualified from pontificating on such a matter. But how about the inset? Perhaps you are too young or too forgetful to link the line drawing with one of the words. Does the date November 22, 1963 jog your memory? Wouldn’t buy from this lot. A joke? What’s funny?