English Rose Kitchen

Brian May’s very clever Red Special

I previously mentioned that at the height of punk I went to my first major gig, a concert at Earls Court by rock dinosaurs giants Queen. Recently I took a trip down memory lane by watching a video of that very event on YouTube.

The gig contained a defining moment in my life. After Brian May had completed a particularly impressive run during Brighton Rock, an impressionable 15 year old boy sitting in the front row who’d just been given a cheap acoustic guitar by a neighbour mouthed the word “WOW!!”. Bri spotted it and nodded at him. I went home determined to learn to play guitar like Brian¹.

My first step was to replace the gut strings on my guitar with steel ones. I think you can see where this is going, but it took a few weeks till it folded in half under the strain, before which I managed to place magnets under each string, attach a wire to each end and plug the whole thing into my dad’s old reel-to-reel tape deck, where by recording on one head and playing back from another I could approximate the delay effect that Brian used on his solos.

An additional, though unintentional, effect was that the guitar now acted as a radio receiver, each fumbled riff being accompanied by (and I kid you not) the monotonous lectures that comprised the output of Radio Moscow in the 70s.

A bit like my first guitar, only mine wasn’t meant to fold in half

Just days before it finally collapsed I’d added a sort of psychaledic multi coloured finish in the medium of felt tipped pen. The effect was hideous.

A couple of years later, still in awe of the fact that Mr May had made his own guitar² and lucky enough to have gone to a school that encouraged that sort of thing, I constructed my own from a design published in Practical Electronics³. With a body made from chipboard and three of the cheapest pickups available, the guitar boasted the sustain of a toy banjo.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I’m so happy I married someone who’s good with her hands. Wifey is a complete perfectionist and in addition to having added a harlequin design to the new floor, she’s recently given an old Ikea shelving unit a wonderful shabby chic makeover.

I’ll upload an image as soon as my bloody Windows powered phone deigns to talk to my PC.

¹On reflection I actually wish I’d chosen Nile Rodgers as my guitar hero of the time, but it was a moot point because soon after that I switched to bass, which was better suited to my stubby fingers.
²Brian’s guitar was a work of genius, fashioned from the seasoned wood of an old fireplace and, if the PR at the time was to be believed, hand wound pickups. Mine was made from a brand new piece of chipboard, veneered to resembled an item of cheap 70s hi-fi. It sported a nut hewn from a piece of smelly cow horn that I’d found somewhere, and an array of switches so bewildering that I had to mount them in a 10″x10″ red, wooden box, that I wore on my hip. Every setting sounded the same and it rarely worked for an entire gig. Which was probably for the best.
³Practical Electronics was the leading magazine for amateur enthusiasts of individual transistors and smelly solder in the 70s. Its high points, as far as I was concerned, was when it published designs for an electric guitar and a synthesiser. Most of its output, however, comprised things like rain detectors. This always seemed to me to be superfluous, since simply looking out of the window could achieve the same result.

An “I scream luxury” shower head

January 7, 2009 was the official start date of our renovation. We’d been planning it for a year or so before then, but Jan 7 was when the contractors moved in and started ripping out the kitchen cabinets without regard for the fact that I was still empting them.

This was immediately followed by the gutting of the shower/steam room. Our guys assured us that the whole job should take less than 2 months, hence my somewhat dubious hygiene of the past year. Luckily we have a second bathroom, but it is just that, a room with a toilet, sink and bath. I’m more of a shower man and while the bath has a shower attachment, squatting down, waving a shower head in and out of the important regions is neither as enticing nor as satisfactory as standing up in a proper shower. My apologies to all those whose path I have crossed on days where I couldn’t face it.

Two days ago the caulking man (a specialist in the field apparently) turned up to seal everything. He said it would be OK to use the shower by the morning, but in deference to the freezing weather I decided to wait and take my first proper shower in over a year today.

Oh the joy! First I switched on the steamer (takes a good 5 or 6 minutes to get up a fully choking head of steam) and stood there baking gently for 10 minutes. Then the shower. We have one of those new fangled big, flat shower heads that just screams “luxury”, as well as a handheld attachment in case I miss my bath squatting days.

A Shaolin monk, presumably being taught to do what it took me about 5 seconds to learn

Then I remembered that despite the new radiator being attached to the wall, it’s not actually hooked up to the plumbing yet and the temperature in that room is about the same as outside, currently sub zero.

I stepped out of the pizza over like confines of the shower/steamer into the (excuse the colourful turn of phrase) nut-crunching cold, enhanced by the fact that we’ve had a lovely new Jerusalem stone floor laid. In under 5 seconds I believe I achieved a retracting manoeuvre ordinarily the provenance of Shaolin monks after many years of study and dedication.

Like an ageing locomotive long past its usefulness being kept on the rails by a band of well meaning enthusiasts, our renovation grinds and wheezes its way towards the buffers at an ever decreasing speed.

As I sit and write this I’m quaffing my third glass of red wine, the result of a meeting we had with our long suffering contractor this evening to try to work out why it’s all taking so god dammed long (and also so that he could ask for half of the outstanding bill. Hence the wine intake).

My personal answer is that when tradesmen turn up every other day to fill one hole, or just to “collect my tools”, you pretty much know their heart has gone out of the project. Two months ago C announced that he was placing a time limit of two weeks to completion and just today, why! He announced that we were “About two weeks from completion”.

We know the guys are as fed up with it as we are because, shortly after managing to smash the outer layer glass on our new oven door, our chippie stormed out, exclaiming “I’m sick of this %$*#ing job!”.

One thing we do know though, is that the water in the shower works. Wifey found that out as she was telling me that it wasn’t really plumbed in yet, while standing, fully clothed, under the shower head and playing with the tap.

Our neighbour over the road started building his extension about three weeks ago and it seriously looks as if he’ll be finishing before we do.

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.

I’ve already documented that the work that took place on our property prior to my purchasing it in ‘98 emphasised the “creative” over the functional and that along the way a bizarre series of building howlers has been exposed.

The latest was when our guys discovered the reason why part of the kitchen kitchen near the outside door was mysteriously concreted. It seemed to be to hide the fact the the drain that so charmingly presents itself as you exit wasn’t lined properly has has been soaking that side of the house for years.

We’d planned to move the drain anyway because it’s the receptacle of all fluids from our kitchen, the kitchen upstairs and that rain water that doesn’t escape from the ill-equipped gutter system above. It stinks and there’s no particular reason for it to be above ground, much less available to step in on entry or exit. On several occasions I’ve had to drunkenly fish my keys from its murky depths.

This week the guys got a specialist in the area to take a look and he refused to touch it. That’s the third time during this project that a specialist in a specific field has refused to touch anything that bares the hallmark of my vendor. It turned out that not only was the drain not lined, but that the only protection from extraneous garbage was a system comprising a drain cover, an 8 inch section of free standing plastic pipe and another drain cover.

The kicker was that when they set to work digging up the rubble to move the drain, they found a still partially inflated football. We shall most certainly be insisting that its creator, our co-freeholder, will be sharing in the cost of setting it right.

Our nearly complete floor, with some extraneous STUFF which resolutely refuses to disappear

After a surprising amount of time during which our stacked up flooring was used as improvised kichen furniture, it’s finally been laid as actual floor and it’s gorgeous.

The delay was caused by residual STUFF that resolutely refused to leave until I insisted on moving some to storage and some to a charity shop (who, it must be said, were somewhat underwhelmed).

We’d agonised for months about what to do with the floor, but kept coming back to a harlequin design on top of he oak and this is where Wifey has come into her own. She spent days researching the best materials and techniques and has so far spent nearly two months taping, staining, restaining and lacquering.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the Wifey side of the family is not cursed by any sense of urgency, but in this case her excess diligence is really paying off. The floor looks fantastic!