Scrubland

We are beginning to be kitcheny.

This is very exciting indeed.

We have moved the cooker. It is now sitting solidly on its new cooker-plinth in the new kitchen.

Obviously this means that at the moment, we are cooking at one end of the house whilst the fridge, the sink, the food, the knives and forks, and everything else of interest in a kitchen, is somewhere else.

I started moving all of these things this morning whilst Mark was busily plastering up holes. He has not been able to do this for ages because there is a National Plaster Shortage, probably people have been hoarding it alongside the bread flour. It is not quite the same colour but presumably it would do in an emergency.

Anyway, this morning he managed to get a special bag of plaster intended to be used for filling in holes, and filled in some holes.

I emptied the cutlery drawer.

Then I encountered a problem.

The problem is that the new kitchen is so bright and airy that I can see all my kitchen things clearly for the first time in years. I have not seen the cooker since it first arrived in 2009, after we purchased it from another taxi driver who had just got some decent school contracts and was having an upgrade.

It was not a pretty sight.

Obviously I do clean the cooker. I clean the cutlery drawer and I clean everything. Regular readers will know that I spend a very great deal of my life engaged in the unending and monumentally dull task of cleaning things.

All the same, when we dragged the cooker out into the daylight, it was not difficult to notice that it was covered in sticky marks and spider webs and burned sausage fat and spilled things.

We looked at it in some discomfort.

I do not think that I would have liked to have visited our house for dinner.

Then Mark went round to the ironmonger’s to purchase some abrasive degreasant scouring and sterilising fluid, and I rolled up my sleeves.

It is a long time since I have seen the television, but I do remember in my youth that they used to show advertisements for special oven cleaning stuff which you had to wipe on, wearing washing up gloves, and then wipe off again. It left a shiny patch where the cloth had been, at which point a little sparkle jumped off towards the camera. A housewife in a polo neck jumper and a smile told us how wonderful it was, and how her newly-sparkling oven had changed her life and made her children work hard at school and her husband stop having affairs.

They did not seem to have any of that in the ironmonger’s, and I spent much of the rest of the day scrubbing.

I scrubbed both ovens and the hob and the grill and the drawer underneath, where I keep baking trays and spiders. The cleaning stuff Mark bought softened the baked-on grease sufficiently for it to be scraped off with a wallpaper scraper, after which it could be scrubbed with a scourer, then washed, then rinsed, then dried.

It was horrid. The cleaning stuff started off as a bright foam which quickly became dreary brown bubbles. I wiped and scraped and scrubbed and cursed and thought that I did not care about having a sparkling oven. In fact my children could loaf about at school and my husband have assignations with half of the street, if it meant that I could sit in the conservatory with a good book and a glass of wine instead of spending my life scrubbing.

Of course I did it in the end, and actually it looks splendid now. I have still not finished moving the kitchen across, more on that topic tomorrow I expect. All the same, I have gone off cleaning, and my hands are jolly sore now.

Instead of pictures of newly-scrubbed ovens I have attached a picture of the conservatory taken first thing this morning.

It makes me feel very happy indeed to have a cup of tea in here.