English Rose Kitchen

A unicycle

Wonderful. I feel like a particularly old codger today.

As I was wobbling along outside the house on my unicycle, a car containing a man, his wife (I’m guessing) and their young daughter (I’m also guessing) in the back pulled up. There’s a drain at the end of our driveway and he opened the door and tried to stuff a slightly rotten banana into it. Then he shut the door and was about to drive off.

At that moment I wobbled up along side him and shouted, through his open window, “Oi mate, I think you dropped something.” “Oh yeah”, he rejoindered, “what have I dropped?”. “A banana”, I replied. “Someone ought to pick it up”. Clearly embarrassed, his wife, who until that point didn’t seem to care, said “He is picking it up”, which he did.

A banana

I felt terrible about embarrassing him in front of his kid and I was slightly worried that it could have gone either way, but I reasoned that since I was on my unicycle if he did try to start something I could always put my foot down and … well, pick it up and hit him with it I suppose.

Jeez I feel old!

Krysten makes up for us not being able to go on holiday by performing crab like movements for our benefit

The Sun is bright, hot and relentless, the cocktails smooth and exotic, the sea laps around feet dangling into the clear waters of the Mediterranean. Yes, our contractors are enjoying their annual summer holidays.

Unfortunately however, we are not. The renovation grinds on and we decided months ago that we didn’t want to go away and come back to a building site so, with the ever increasing delays, we find ourselves without a summer holiday this year.

On the face of it there’s only a little more to do. 5 weeks ago they gave us an estimate that it would all be finished 3 weeks ago. There’s now no chance whatsoever that it will be complete by Carnival, so sadly no chance of putting any friends up that weekend.

Which is probably for the best actually. It’s going to be a pretty busy one for us, not least because on the Monday (Aug 31) Rotten Hill Gang are playing on Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues stage on Talbot Road outside The Globe and then one of our singers, Krysten Cummings, has to dash straight off to Leicester Square for the première of a movie she’s in, “The Descent 2″.

Sorry just rambling because there’s currently nowhere else to sit around here but in front of the computer!

It may not seem like much, but when you’ve been kitchenless for as long as us, seeing the worktop appearing in place above our run of units feels like magic.

Despite the fact that it is clearly now closer to a room for cooking than relaxing in and that we relinquished its former use nearly 7 months ago, we’re having trouble not calling the new kitchen the living room.

What was our kitchen is now to be the exercise area, the old dining area is soon to be the living room and the previous living room is nearly the kitchen. I’m very much looking forward to being able to say, Big Brother (UK) style, “Ehht Thir’y ehh ehm. Rehh is in the eehxcerise eehria”^1,2,3.

Sort of starting to look like a kitchen

¹For non-UK citizens and those simply bemused, the voiceover man on BB here is from a city in the north east called Newcastle. People from Newcastle are nicknamed Geordies and they speak a dialect that’s impossible for the rest of us to imitate, comprising as it does a series of vowels so flat you could serve drinks on them and a succession of glottal stops the likes of which us Londoners can only dream of.

³… with sincere apologies to Newcastle, whose people, accent and city I love dearly.

Wifey chews the cud

You know – many people have asked me “What is the secret behind keeping the romance of a marriage going throughout an unexpectedly extended renovation of some sort?”¹ and today I can reveal just one of the techniques we have employed.

As far as British summers go (and not including the summers of ‘75 and especially ‘76) this one ain’t ‘alf been bad. Occasionally. Whatever, one on of those occasions we elected to eat, as Lilly Allen would have it, “Al fresco”. In this instance at the end of our driveway.

The most romantic date I’ve ever had with Wifey was when she returned to her family’s home in

The evening is hotting up

Maryland while I remained at home in West London. We set up our web cams in our respective kitchens and cooked the same meal at each end. Later, as we sat down to eat, we placed our respective laptops across our respective dining tables and, having dressed appropriately, lit or respective candles.

We even went as far as to buy the same bottle of wine and if I passed mine out of shot just as she grabbed hers it had the effect of appearing as if we sharing the same bottle of wine². After only a short time we completely forgot that we were separated by 3,000 odd miles and an ocean. The only awkward moment came when it was time to say goodbye and we couldn’t decide whether the phrase “Your place or mine” was appropriate.

But I digress³. In what may seem like a fairly mundane event, Wifey and I decided to enjoy one of our recent long-ish summer’s evening’s by dragging out the picnic table that is mysteriously built in to our car and hosting our very own romantic dinner for two.

During one especially poignant moment I wandered off to purchase another bottle of wine, while our cat Smirkle occupied my seat. Some passers-by, noting that Wifey was sharing a “special moment” with her cat were moved it ask if she needed company. I suspect that I will be required to edit this last paragraph in the morning.

¹For the avoidance of doubt, that is a complete lie. It is nothing but a literary technique designed to embew an otherwise pedestrian article with a sense of gravitas

²This is not entirely true either. The fact is that neither of us could help noticing that due to the fact that we weren’t really sharing the same bottle of wine we both got twice as drunk as normal.

³For non British readers or British readers under the age of about 40, this is reference to the humour of Ronnie Corbett, who, as part of The Two Ronnies used to entertain the nation once a week with a particularly rambling shaggy dog’s tail during which he would make several – er – digressions. Watching reruns on the show recently it really hasn’t stood the test of time.

50 years of funk

OK this is starting to get exciting. Here’s a pic of the floor units in their eventual resting place. They look a little forlorn in this snap, but in real life they are nothing less than majestic, wondrous and – oh alright, they’re kitsch as hell.

Rather charmingly, just after we saw them in place for the first time Wifey asked me if I thought they might date quickly. I explained that they’re already over 50 years old and were as likely to date as my moustache, but on reflection I’m not quite sure what that means.

Some sort of shrine like structure

In truth that shot was taken several weeks ago, but due to the gradual degradation of my phone’s connectivity with my PC I was unable to post it till recently. Since then our genius contractors have managed to build the unit that is to house the fridge, oven and microwave and paint it the same glorious hue as the units themselves. Why – here’s a picture of it now.