English Rose Kitchen

When Madonna appeared on Jonathan Ross¹ in one of the best interviews I’ve seen him do, she was trying to prove her credentials as a born again Brit by claming that she liked nothing more than to while away a few pleasant hours in a lovely old English pub². Thinking he was calling her bluff. He asked her what her favourite bitter³ was. “I’m quite partial to a pint of Timothy Taylor” came the reply. Wossy⁴ thought she had just made something up to save face, but the next day a newspaper found out that Timothy Taylor did indeed exist and was made by a small brewery in West Yorkshire. Subsequently a few pubs here in the South East have started to stock it and I’ve found that I have something in common with Mrs Richie, I like the stuff too.

This evening Ray and I must have been having some kind of argument (we can’t remember, the Timmy Taylor has kicked in in between) because she ran off round to the North Pole, one of our locals. The argument (and remember we’re not really sure if there was one) can’t have been that serious because she called 5 minutes later to tell me that the North Pole now sells TT.

Ray is gregarious almost to a fault. When I arrived at the pub she was already entertaining one of the locals, Dave, who in turn was entertaining her with a virtuosic display of cockney rhyming slang⁵. Now strictly speaking, because I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, I’m a cockney, but my parents hammered out any trace of a local dialect when I was young by sending me to elocution lessons. That’s right, I’m a Londoner born and bred, but I cannot do a London accent! Nonetheless I managed to teach him “It’s all gone Pete Tong”⁶.

Dave, it turns out, is a builder/decorator who works with other builders/decorators on rather high end projects some as the National Galery and Very Rich People’s Homes. He explained to us (in ever shortening loops, the more he had to drink) that he’s “not cheap, but we’ll give you the date that we’ll turn up and we’ll be there on that day. We’ll give you a schedule and we’ll stick to it and we’ll give you a quote and that’s the price you’ll pay”. For some reason we believe him, so we explain what it is that we’re trying to do and arrange to have him round to take a look. He did, after all, paint a large mural at the end of a cul-de-sac just near the North Pole.

Notes for non UK readers

¹ Jonathon Ross is a popular TV presenter with his own chat show, known for being hilarious and making his interviewees look good at the same time.
² I can confirm that this is (sort of) true. When she and Guy were living in Holland Park, she apparently used to frequent a pub called the Windsor Castle, notable for two VERY low doorways (one is about 4 feet high). A friend of mine was in there once and noticed her in the corner. When she got up to leave about half the pub got up with her, because they were all her security guards.
³ Bitter is what the rest of the world thinks of as “warm, flat beer”. An acquired taste usually guaranteed to turn the stomachs of non Brits, along with Marmite. Strangely Ray has acquired it since she’s been here.
⁴ Mr Ross makes a feature of the fact that he can’t pronounce his “R”s. A musician friend of mine is terrified of being interviewed by him because he goes out under the name “Ranking Roger”.
⁵ Cockney slang involves finding a (usually 2 or 3 word) phrase whose last word rhymes with the word you actually want to say, then sometimes only saying the first word of the phrase. So “look” becomes “butcher’s hook”, which is usually reduced to “butcher’s”, as in “Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s”.
⁶ Pete Tong is a DJ specialising in dance music and his name, when used in the phrase “It’s all gone Pete Tong”, means “wrong”. It’s very modern slang, probably only about 10 years old, so it might not count.
⁷ (Yes I know there isn’t really a ⁷, this is completely gratuitous). Isn’t it amazing how quickly the singer James Blunt’s name became rhyming slang?

What were all those non English Rose Kitchen posts doing here anyway?
OK It’s finally happened. From the word go Ray was nagging me not to post non kitchen renovation articles to this blog. “If you must stray from the subject, at least make it related!” she’d say. “Bathrooms, fine. Interior design and home renovation in general, also fine!”. I toyed sheepishly with my mouse as she said “But why on Earth do you think you ought to post items about your band, about Notting Hill or about Timothy bloody Taylor beer to a site about our home?”.

And she had a point. Well – not the “Timothy bloody Taylor” bit actually, I made that up. she’s American, so if she said that it would have sounded something like Liza Doolittle, but that was the gist of it.

The trouble is I like writing
I like the sound of my own typing too much. And so Notting Hill Diary was born. The site is about our neighbourhood. It’s growing all the usual stuff about the history Notting Hill, Notting Hill Carnival, bars, pubs, restaurants and cinemas in the area. But I’m also I’m trying to keep it topical and entertaining with interesting articles you won’t find on one of those sites that’s little more than a glorified RSS agregator.

And I’ve sent all the offending articles over to their new home. I’ve enjoyed having them here, but we all know that it’s for the best that they reside in a more relevant location. Fairwell irrelevant tittle tattle that I can’t help writing. We’ve enjoyed entertaining you, but now it’s time to get serious about kitchens once again. We’re nearly back sleeping in our bedroom (we’ve been sleeping in the living room for what seems live forever), which means that we’re about to take the Great Leap Forward as far as our English Rose Kitchens plans go.

Footnote: OK I’ve finally removed all the non kitchen related articles to http://www.nottinghilldiary.com. It’s sad to see them go, but they’ve found a better home there.

I’ve now installed the DoFollow plugin to this blog so that anytime you add a comment any link to your own site will actually count for something in Google’s eyes. I’ve already explained why that is on my other blog in the article Notting Hill Diary now a nofollow free zone so I won’t bore you with the details again here.

Remember how gutted we were to have to sell our gorgeous Smeg FAB28? I guess we still miss it in all its retro glory, but we knew inside that our storage requirements greater than it could offer.

It turns out that that we couldn’t be happier with its replacement, the glorious Electrolux American Fridge Freezer ENL62981XX3. Despite the issue of the exterior being far from the “excellent condition” described in the eBay auction, it works perfectly and it’s a revelation to be able to see and access its entire contents without resorting to Pilates style contortions. Also far less food is getting wasted due to either disappearing to the nether regions or getting frozen to the rear wall. Fridge burn is a thing of the past.

The freezer half of it too is a joy to use. Being able to see every item clearly is  a real advantage. The tendancy with our old box of a freezer was to put things in unmarked plastic boxes, stack them in one of the four compartments and … periodically wonder what they were.

It’s amazing how you can live somewhere for years pondering over a problem and then one day the bleedin’ obvious hits you in the face. Yesterday we realised that the new fridge was never going to fit through the door between the living room and kitchen, at least, not without taking the doors off and struggling (which is wha we did).

The problem we’ve been facing is that despite the fact that our kitchen/dining area is pretty big, there’s not a lot of usable wall space because of the positioning of doors, radiators and a cute wooden supporting structure that’s used to divide the space into three pokey little rooms. when we realised there would be a problem moving the fridge into the kitchen we thought “Why not swap the kitchen and lounge?!”. What is now the lounge has far more usable wall space and would allow for a centre island and still have room for a dining area at the end where the stage is¹.

¹Don’t get excited, it’s only about 6 inches high and 8 feet across and the only performance that has ever taken place there was about seven years ago by a Norwegian poet friend of mine, Øystein Wingaard Wolf. We call him Ø for short.