It’s the young ones that breakdown. The heirlooms, like my mother’s first and only microwave oven, circa 1975, still plods on in my kitchen, rotating the porridge, making stranger and stranger noises — four times the size of a modern one and ten times the weight!
The newer, double-hob-cooker went on working but the doors fell off.
Every time something needs replacing it gets more and more complicated — that’s progress! The hole is the wrong size, it needs replacement nozzles for bottled gas and they’ll only send them to a certified gas fitter, so we wait and Granny’s microwave holds the fort until new nozzles cross the sea and the certified young men appear (the old man couldn’t fix the doors any more). Young men look strong but are prohibited from carrying away the old cooker so, huffily, I start to unscrew everything I can and I take away it’s drawers, not to humiliate it but to reduce the weight and, with the use of a sack barrow, Bill (joining in reluctantly because he knows I’m being manipulative) helps me struggle to shove, slide and lever the skeleton cooker towards the french windows and the back of our old truck, which still works. We grunt a lot and I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand and the young men say,”Oh bugger it, we’ll lift it into the back of the truck for you.”
We drive it to the last remaining scrap yard in rural Wales which is un-reformed, un-improved, unapologetic and not in public ownership or subject to regulation or an appointment system. We back up to the scrap metal pile, open the back of the truck and pull the meter-wide stove to the edge. We heave, we jump clear and it crashes to the ground. The hydraulic grab working further up the hill doesn’t seem to notice but the old horse in the tumble-down stable looks over with an acknowledging nod and a snort as if to say,”There was a time I’d have collected that.”
The local purveyor of cookers is an honest man, “I only sell this model to people I don’t like!”
Tough! It’s the only one that fits!
With it’s lovely new nozzles correctly fitted it cooks much better than the posh one ever did with the wrong nozzles adjusted by an uncertified person.
There will be a time when we won’t be able to do this anymore — one way or another.
We were recently in Cornwall and my daughters toaster burst into flames — it was very dramatic and my fault — I had not prepared her for adult life, never shown her the little drawer that you pull out to reveal the 20 years of crumbs accumulating since she left home. It was unplugged and carried like a child having a paddy, into the garden to burn out and cool off.
Later that day it was repatriated — it’s little drawer was revealed, emptied and it was plugged in and worked perfectly well for the rest of our stay — it probably had belonged to her Granny.
On Boxing Day Bill’s fridge-freezer conked out, perhaps due to the weight of left-overs eager to go off. Or perhaps, more likely, because on Christmas Eve, persuaded of the need for a little more space for bottles, he had introduces a slimmer, younger model into the kitchen to help over Christmas.
As the puddle on the floor extends, I am full of trepidation.
dianaashworth 