We are in such a terrible mess that I was not at all sorry to slope off upstairs and write to you.
I left Mark in the new kitchen. He is not tidying it up. He is moving the place where the dishwasher is about to be because I have decided that I want it to be different. At least I think I have decided. I might decide that I want it moved back again tomorrow.
The new kitchen is absolutely lovely.
I mean lovely in a potential way, obviously, not in an actual way. At the moment it is a squalid hell-hole full of dust and crumbs and clutter and spiders. It is lovely in the sense that when it is finished it is going to be the happiest kitchen ever.
I hope so anyway. I hope that its beautiful perfection will make me like washing up and cleaning the fridge out.
It is a joy to be in. It is absolutely designed for a person of my size. Mark has always built kitchens for my size, but this is the first time that we have seriously thought about work surface height and changed it massively.
When you have a fitted kitchen there is a fairly standard sort of cupboard. These stand on legs which can be raised or dropped a little bit. This time Mark has made the floor under the cooker and the cupboards lower than the floor in front of them, so they are all standing in a respectful little hole.
The surfaces are exactly the right height for kneading bread or rolling pastry, and it is the most peculiar experience. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been able to see inside the pans when they are on the back rings of the cooker.
It feels like the sensation of being a child in a Wendy house. It is really very, very much smaller than any kitchen I have ever used, and it is quite astonishing. It has made me realise how commanding it must feel to be as tall as Mark, when everything is in easy reach and tables are at a convenient height.
We have been bashing away at it all day. We have moved the fridge, and took the opportunity to prize the ice out of it, after which we cleaned it, virtuously, although I don’t mind telling you that I am getting jolly sick of cleaning things. It was not as bad as it might have been because we have not been shopping for ages, and so there was not much to empty out. I must get round to doing some shopping, maybe one day when we have some cash and a kitchen.
The fridge is going to stand in the little alcove next to the back door. We hauled it across the living room and jammed it in, because it only just about fits. Then we spent ages crawling about jamming bits of wood underneath to make it level. This was an awful lot of faffing about. When we had finally finished we stood back to switch it on and realised that I had forgotten to switch the socket on when I plugged it in at the back. In the end we had to tip the fridge forward as far as it would go and Mark held it up whilst I reached in behind it and switched the socket switch on with a broom handle. Apart from that it has worked splendidly. The fridge looks beautifully golden in the sunshine.
We gave up halfway through the afternoon and went to have a socially distanced cup of tea with our neighbours, which was ace, most especially because it would have taken me ages to salvage everything necessary for making a cup of tea. It was not very distant because their back yard is not big enough to sit a long way apart, but nobody coughed so probably it was all right. We felt entirely refreshed afterwards, and returned to bashing about the kitchen with a new vigour.
I am going to go and see if Mark has finished moving the dishwasher place yet. I need to look at it so that I can decide if I will like it.
You can’t be too careful about these things.
