Soup, A Cauli
Scandalously, the My Word! books remain stubbornly out of print, and I don't know if it ever gets repeated on Radio 4 Extra or whatever, but I remember this from the time and it should be better known (this text was in "The Utterly Ultimate My Word! Collection")
THE pure unalloyed joy, the flight of the heart on wings of song, the flowering of the spirit like the opening of a jacaranda-tree blossom at the prospect of my wife returning tomorrow after a week away is tempered by the thought of the squalid state the kitchen is in.
In order to preserve the balance of nature it is vital that I maintain the fiction that I am capable, at a pinch, of looking after myself and can be left for a few hours without change and decay taking over the household. So, in the few hours left me, I have an alarming number of important things to do, most of which have been brought about by my firm conviction that women run things on old-fashioned, traditional lines which would benefit from the application of a cold, rational, male intelligence; i.e. mine.
First of all I must replenish the stock of tinned soup in the store cupboard. Round about Day Two I realised that man could live on tinned soup alone. It heats up in a jiffy and, more than that, the tin can be used as a throwaway saucepan. With the help of a pair of pliers to hold the thing, the empty tin can be used to boil eggs or anything else and then thrown away; the soul-numbing process of washing-up is thereby minimised. The trouble is that a keen female eye, viewing the stock cupboard, will spot at a glance that a suspicious quantity of tinned soup has been consumed. So it must be replaced.
On Day One I had realised that, as master of all I surveyed, I did not have to eat vegetables. I have no religious or moral objections to vegetables but they are, as it were, dull. They are the also-rans of the plate. One takes an egg, or a piece of meat, or fish, with pleasure but then one has, as a kind of penance, to dilute one's pleasure with a damp lump of boskage. However, this puritan attitude that no meal is worthy without veg. is strongly held in this house so I must somehow give the impression that vegetables have been consumed in quantity. What I must do is to buy a cauliflower and shake it about a bit in the kitchen. Fragments will then be found under the table and in corners, giving the impression that vegetables have been in the forefront of my diet.
And then there is the refrigerator. This seemed to me a most inefficient instrument, yielding up stiff butter when I wanted it to spread, ice-cold milk when I wanted milk to warm up for the coffee, and when I needed some ice cubes the ice container was apparently welded to the shelf with cold. So I instituted a system whereby I switched off the fridge at breakfast, thereby making the contents malleable when I needed them, and switched it on again at night. This has worked quite well except that the contents of the fridge are now a cluster of variously sized rectangular snowballs. I must remember to take a hammer and chisel to them before tomorrow.
And I need a stout elastic band because I have done in the vacuum cleaner. I used one of my gumboots for kitchen refuse to save messing about with a bin but liquids seeped through a hole in the toe. The obvious solution to a hole in a gumboot toe is to bung it up with a mixture of sawdust and the remains of that tin of car undersealing compound which one has in one's garage. I poured the underseal and the sawdust into a thing called a Liquidiser, which is a kind of electric food-mixer, but what I failed to note was that one is supposed to put the lid on before operating it. And when I began to vacuum clean the mixture of tar and sawdust off the kitchen ceiling it seemed to jam up the works. The motor went on running but there was a smell of burning rubber and now I must, before tomorrow, provide the vacuum cleaner with a new rubber band.
And eggs. We have an ark in the orchard containing nine hens, which provide us with a regular intake of beige eggs. I went out to feed them on Evening One and I think that they missed my wife. They greeted me, I felt, reproachfully, making sounds not unlike those made by Mr Frankie Howerd. "Ooh!" they went, "Ooooh, OooooOOOh." So I undid the door of the ark and led them on an educational tour of the garden, pointing out where the new drainage is to be laid, the place on the lawn where I had lost my lighter, the vulgar shape which one of the poplar trees had grown into. And then the dogs joined us and helped to take the chickens out of themselves by chasing them, and soon the air was filled with feathers and joyous squawks. I finally got the chickens back into the ark by midnight but, oddly, they haven't laid an egg between them the whole week. Since my wife will be expecting to be greeted by about three dozen beige eggs, I must do something about this before she returns. I also had a spot of bother with a packet of frozen peas. I thought I would vary my diet by making myself a Spanish omelet, i.e. as I understood it, an omelet with a pea or two in it. Now the packet stated clearly that if less than four servings was required the necessary amount could be obtained by giving the frozen pack a sharp buffet with an instrument. I had my soup tin on the gas-stove, with a knob of butter in it, and I obeyed the instructions; that is to say, I held the frozen lump in my left hand and aimed a blow at it with a convenient instrument - my dog's drinking bowl. It worked up to a point. One frozen pea detached itself, bounced off my knee, and disappeared. Where had it gone? My Afghan hound was right next to me at the time, watching keenly what I was doing with her bowl, and I had a sudden horrible suspicion that the pea had gone into her ear. I called to her. She evinced no interest. I went round the other side and called again. She looked up. I made a mental note to take the dog to the vet for a swift peaectomy operation before tomorrow.
Lastly there is the problem of my breath. Last night I made myself a casserole of sausages - or rather, a soup-tin-role of sausages - but I seemed to have lost the salt. After a deal of searching I found an alien looking container marked 'Sel' and applied it liberally. It seems that it was garlic salt. I did not realise what it had done to my breath- one doesn't with garlic - until this afternoon when I stood waiting for somebody to open a door to me and suddenly noticed that the varnish on the door was bubbling.
So I have a number of things to remember to do before tomorrow, such as tinned soup, a cauliflower, de-frosting the refrigerator, buying an elastic band for the vacuum cleaner, getting in three dozen beige eggs, seeing the vet about the pea in the dog's ear and taking something for the garlic on my breath.
How, you are perhaps asking yourself, will he possibly remember all these things? Well, hopefully I have put them all together into a kind of chant, or song. It goes: "Soup ... a cauli ... fridge ... elastic ... eggs ... pea ... halitosis."
posted by Paul Rhodes | 12:04 am
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