Milner and Bacchus

Some time ago we watched a number of episodes from both Inspector George Gently and Foyle's War. We've been watching them again on Netflix recently, and catching up with ones we missed.

They're two similar series in many respects: both set in the past (the first in the early sixties, and the second during and after the Second World War); both featuring an older and wiser senior detective with a sidekick. The older detective is always on the button, even when things flummox him, and in both cases he has a liberal point of view: not racist, not fazed by people's foibles, and - more in Foyle's case even than Gently's - he is inherently just, which sometimes means letting certain people off the hook. However episodes in both series often end with a hanging.

The biggest difference is between the two sidekicks. Foyle's man, Paul Milner, who was injured in the war and retired from duty, is an earnest, quietly-spoken, almost invisible character who, like a straight man in a comedy duo, asks all the pertinent questions, so that Foyle can pontificate. He's as dull as ditchwater (no fault of the actor, who's given an almost colourless character to deal with). There's another offsider, a young girl who starts off as Foyle's driver, and in the later series is the wife of an aspiring MP. She's a bit more interesting, though she often gets Foyle into difficulties by being too willing to take risks. Milner was eventually retired from the series: he moved to a different station, but even then Foyle came along inopportunely, and solved his cases for him (!)

Gently's sidekick is a Detective Sergeant called John Bacchus. He's presumptuous, arrogant, cocky, racist, chauvinistic and frequently wrong-headed. Even though he seldom solves much on his own, unlike Milner, he has personality in spades (it perhaps helps that he's played by Lee Ingleby, one of TV's top notch actors) and however much he trips up you can't help liking him.

Martin Shaw plays Gently, very quietly, only occasionally raising his voice, and even less often getting angry with someone who's blatantly trying to con the police. Shaw was 62 when he began the series in 2007; he's now 70, and doesn't move any faster than necessary.

The superb Michael Kitchen (who's three years younger) is Foyle. He can take a basic line and give it such emphasis, or surround it with pauses, that you think he's delivering Shakespeare. One of the delights of Foyle's War is Kitchen's acting. And his wry humour. I don't enjoy Shaw so much, though he has the measure of his character, and provides plenty of subtlety within a relatively quiet frame. Sometimes he seems to be given just a bit too much of the older, wiser stuff (though Bacchus can be such a dolt it's not hard), but he seldom overplays it.

The stories vary in intensity and interest. In general the supporting casts in the Gently series seem better than those in Foyle. But it's probably a moot point. There are plenty of good actors in both series, including some now famous faces in the earlier episodes, including David Tennant (Dr Who) and Emily Blunt.

Holiday's over, guys!

We've been privileged this January to be hosts to a bunch of smallish flies (not tiny ones) who apparently think they're spending their holiday break either in our kitchen or lounge, or sometimes in the bathroom and sometimes in the laundry. There are only ever about half a dozen at any one time, but they lazily float around the centre of the room, refusing to go anywhere near windows or doors, and consequently not only get in your way whenever you move, but also make it irritating watching TV, because there's this subtle movement constantly being caught in your peripheral vision.

Blowflies have the sense to make a great fuss about the fact that they've somehow got themselves trapped indoors, and are eternally grateful if you open a window for them that they can actually find their way out of. Although they do seem a little lacking in brain: open a window and they'll fly smack into the closed one next to it, or sit on the glass in the open window wondering where the breeze is coming from. But at least they generally leave when requested. And they plainly have places to go and things to do, if the speed of their departure is anything to go by.

These other little flies, however, have long since outstayed their welcome - though at least they don't make any noise. Finally we made up a mix of vinegar and water to spray at them, because I don't like using normal fly sprays, especially in the kitchen. All that happened was they got wet and carried on swinging back and forth across the room drying themselves. My daughter's comment was that the only way they would die was if they drowned from excess water. This didn't seem to happen.

Last night we resorted to using a proper fly spray. There was a sudden emptiness in the middle of the room after I'd sprayed it at them, and I was sure they'd all been sent to the place where all flies go (not somewhere I'm keen to follow, incidentally). Obviously one or two missed the blast, because this morning I notice that distinct movement out of the corner of my eye. Hopefully however, they'll have the sense to realise that the Summer holidays are over and they need to go back to wherever they came from.

Update: 22.2.21

We've moved to Oamaru since I wrote this post. Oamaru is a town about an hour and half's drive from Dunedin, our former home. Here we have an ongoing problem with small flies, and in fact we got a fly net to cover the back door which is where the bulk of them were coming in from. As in Dunedin, the big blowflies, the noisy ones, will happily go out a window if you open it for them. Not the little fellows: they love to hang round making no noise, floating across the room, or landing somewhere you think you can swipe them and then whistling off at great speed...only to linger in the air again once the danger has passed. My wife is not fond of them, and even though we've used fly spray on them, it seems you have to get them dead on for it to have any effect. 

Church Camp Year 2

We've been away at a church camp for the last few days - went there on Friday afternoon and came back this afternoon, so almost three whole days. My wife and I were assisting the chief cook to prepare the meals, afternoon and morning teas and suppers for up to 140 people, and keep the kitchen from getting in a total state of chaos. So it was up early (started around 7 am on average) and finishing well after the evening meal - by which time supper would also have been prepared and laid out. We did this regime last year too, though that was over a shorter period of time. We'd learned one or two tricks as a result. For instance, just because the chief cook is apparently capable to going from 7 am until whenever at night, doesn't mean we have to do the same. I remember last year sitting down at one point from utter exhaustion - after having stood for several hours (it seemed) - and feeling guilty.  This year I just went off and had a quick kip, or sat and read for a while in the motel unit we were occupying. It didn't hold anyone up and I was all the better for it (my wife did this too). In spite of that, both my wife and I have come home very weary, with sore feet and legs, and feel like having the rest of the week off. The indefatigable chief cook goes back to work tomorrow, and not in a job that's in any way lightweight.  Some people just have inexhaustible reserves.

She's also wonderful to work with. You can ask as many questions as you like and she's always patient - so you kind of receive on the job training. Next year - if there is a next year - I might even be able to make the 'home-made' ice cream from memory without having to ask her yet again what to do. (The home-made ice cream actually has cream in it, and condensed milk, and crushed up Crunchie Bars. It's unbelievably rich, and not a good thing to make if you don't have any discipline about licking up the leftover condensed milk...)

Storage space

Having stayed in three different houses over the last couple of months, plus our own, you get to notice how kitchens are laid out. Why kitchens?  Because these are the rooms that are most likely to need a lot of storage space, and yet have less space available for it. A kitchen has to be massive and full of the sort of storage equipment available at ovisonline.com before it can comfortably accommodate all those large and small items that regularly make their homes there.

Our kitchen is bigger than it used to be, but it still gets into a jumble at times as things wind up in places they shouldn't have gone. And like everyone else, no doubt, we've made decisions as to where to put things, and now have to live with those decisions...unless we're prepared to undo the whole caboodle and try alternatives. 

I had an uncle once who insisted - almost from the day I first met him (when I was a very young man) - that the motto should be, a place for everything and everything in its place.  This worked fine as long as people knew the place where everything went and put the things back. But laziness can creep into kitchens unless you're very disciplined, and certain cupboards and drawers in our kitchen work along the lines of a place for everything if something else hasn't got there first; in which case squeeze them both in, by force, if necessary. As mottoes go, it isn't the most succinct, but it's workable.

Thanks to the Embracing Our Inner Web blog for the photo.
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The doggie-door saga continues

About ten days ago we installed a doggie door in our back door.  We wondered if the dog would ever work out how to get himself out of it, and back in again, in spite of considerable encouragement, treats, undignified pushes from behind and so on.

Well, all that wonderful hard work we did on helping him to discover that he now has an open door policy has paid off, and he trips in and out of it (I don't mean literally) without blinking an eyelid (again, don't be a literalist).  Occasionally he feels he should wait for permission, but we try and avoid giving him that.  He has to be his own man on this matter, and decide that when he wants to go out, he just gets on and goes.

He's had some routines in the past for going out. For instance, if we were in the lounge and he'd been in bed for a while in the other room and decided he needed a late night pee, he'd come in and stare balefully at me until I realised what he wanted.  Then he'd scoot to the back door and dance around in circles until he was let out. He doesn't have this option anymore, although he did try the baleful look thing last night. I ignored it for a while but finally realised that old habits die hard and he needed me to at the very least go to the kitchen and pretend to give him permission while doing something unrelated.

We used to find he was forever wanting in and out while we were making dinner in the kitchen. I don't quite know what the reason for this was, but it was annoying continually having to open the door for him.  Anyway, this issue has gone; if he wants out, he goes out.  And sometimes sits at the backdoor thinking about old times when he had us on a string and we would jump to action as soon as he indicated a need.

I feel as though a little something has been lost in the relationship, but I'm sure there are compensations.  The back door isn't getting scratched for one thing.  The cat hasn't decided that it's a multi-animal door, so she doesn't use it (it's probably beneath her dignity anyway, though how a creature that dumps a large mouse or small rat on the doorstep should consider itself to have dignity I don't know).  Consequently there's no squabbling between the cat and the dog as to whose access it is. And there's no longer the crazy rabies-infested-mad-dog-behaviour when it discovers, on our opening the door, that the cat is sitting just outside it.

Long weekend

My wife and I spent the weekend (from Friday, just after lunch, until lunchtime on Sunday) at our church's annual family camp.  There were a 170 happy campers, some not so happy because of the heavy rain that we had (especially on Friday). They had to set their tents up in the downpours.  Most people chose to be in 'cabins' - a bit of a misnomer in this particular place, since they're more like long buildings with small rooms in them.  Either way, those people didn't get quite so wet.  

We were privileged to be housed in one of the two motel units on the site, along with the other people running the kitchen for the weekend.  (That's what we were there for, too.)   Working in the kitchen was an interesting experience: I haven't done a lot of physical work ever in my working life, and even less over the last few years, so being on my feet for hours at a time, and keeping up with the punishing routine of a kitchen providing for that many people was quite exhausting.  I got to the point on several occasions where if I hadn't sat down I would have fallen over.

Not being a cook, except in my own kitchen at home, I helped with all sorts of lesser jobs, from peeling things to cutting up things, to stirring soups, to putting more flavours into the soups, to convincing people that one soup was called Moroccan Mystery (it had a cauliflower base, which the cook said wouldn't impress people, so we didn't tell them - just let them try to guess!); to serving 170 people and telling them the names of the soups over and over, or where to get the milk, or the plates or whatever; to washing up stuff, to cleaning floors, to wiping down benches, to helping with baking (my contribution to one lot of baking was to put the flour in, and the baking powder - after that I got sidetracked onto something else); to putting out dishes and taking back the empties again, and so on.  You name it, we did it.

We not only served full-scale main meals, but full-scale breakfasts (people seem to eat a lot more when they're at a camp) and morning and afternoon teas and suppers with baking that had been done in the hours since the last meal.  Some food was brought in ready to be cooked, but not much.  Most was done on site.

With the kitchen not being fully commercial a fair degree of improvising was required on the part of  two talented cooks: they were forever juggling ovens and hot plates and oven trays and the like in order to get everything done on time.  We had some help from some of the campers who'd been rostered on to do stuff at different times, but in general we had the place to ourselves.

By Sunday the sun had come out and improved the state of things, but by Sunday my wife and I were wiped out: we didn't even manage to make it home (only an hour and a half) before we felt we had to have a snooze.  The joys of old age....

Dragon and Foyle

Last year I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  It's certainly a page-turner, but, as I said at the time, it's also very graphic in its sadistic detail.  This is something I puzzle over, since Larsson was supposed to be very much against abuse towards women.  Does a book in which sexual abuse is so graphically described really make abusers turn away from their behaviour?  Does it make us more aware?  I haven't read the other two books in the trilogy, which I've now discovered are linked to the first in a number of ways.   I'm still not sure that I want to.  

Nevertheless last night we watched the Swedish movie of the first book in the series.   We fast-forwarded through the abuse scenes (including the one where Lisbeth, the girl of the title, takes vengeance on the man who's abused her) because we really didn't need to see these.  Both my wife and I remembered them from the book without having them portrayed here.

But the film, of course, is a good deal more than abuse; it's an excellent thriller and detective story, and that's its major appeal, I suspect.  (Do many readers go to a book to read about sexual abuse?)  I know that the English version of the movie has been well-received and is highly-regarded, and no doubt Daniel Craig can play a world-weary journalist as well as anyone, but he'd have his work cut out to do better than Michael Nyqvist, whose battered face gives him a head start anyway.  And Noomi Rapace would be hard to beat as Lisbeth (in fact I hear that she does beat her English-language equivalent).  


So in terms of excellent contemporary filmmaking, Dragon Tattoo comes out on top.  Pity about having to fast-forward some parts, though. 


As a total contrast, we've been watching episodes of Foyle's War, a television series set during the Second World War that's been airing since the early 2002, and is due to be revived this year (the series hasn't aired every year).  These are very mild detective stories, relatively-speaking (the three murders in the last episode we saw were exceptional).  The degree of detective work varies; as is so often the case, the earlier episodes had better mysteries than the later ones, but the real pleasure of this series is watching Michael Kitchen, who, as Inspector Foyle, has a wonderful role as a humane policeman who not only aims to see justice done, but more often than not, tempers that justice with mercy, even to some who least deserve it.  


The curiously-named Honeysuckle Weeks plays his co-opted driver (Foyle can't drive a car) and Anthony Howell plays his offsider, who began the series with a prosthetic leg.  This seems to have been forgotten as time goes on!  There have never been more than four episodes per season, so there's no sense of staleness about the series, or the characters.  The earlier episodes were interesting because of a couple of now famous names that appeared in smaller roles: David Tennant (Dr Who) was one such.  

Creating Creativity

Earlier in the month, Tony Schwartz, on the Conversation (one of the Harvard Business blogs) wrote a piece  called Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation.

It's geared towards those running a business, primarily, but I thought it might be interesting to consider how a loan wolf artist like myself might use the 'secrets.'

The first secret is 'Meet people's needs.'   Well, that's something I have no problem doing: if my inner man says, in the middle of writing something, I'm hungry, I send him off to the kitchen (which is conveniently placed a couple of metres away from my computer).   He can make as many cups of tea or coffee as he likes in a day - or finish off that fruitcake someone obligingly gave me...him.   If my inner man has unmet needs, I know about them pretty quickly, as you can imagine.   I can't always settle them immediately, (especially if the fruitcake was finished the day before) but I do my best.

The second secret (how can these be secrets if he's telling us them?) is 'Teach creativity systematically.'   According to Schwartz there are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification.   I read the blog post the link in the previous sentence takes you to (it's very irritatingly bringing up some oddball codes on my browser) and I don't particularly disagree with these steps.   Although when she (someone called simply, Maria) says, "The first stage of the creative process is finding or formulating a problem. The tricky part about this stage is that it requires creativity in itself," I kinda feel that there's a bit of a catch 22 in there somewhere.   However, these stages are worth considering - once I've dealth with one of my inner man's unmet needs.

The third secret is to nurture passion.   I have to be excited about what I'm creating.  Don't give me some mundane work to do; my inner many won't stand it.  He'll hive off to the kitchen again.

This ties in with the fourth secret: make the work matter.  There's no point giving me a job writing about cashmere mittens for women if I don't have some excitement about aforesaid cashmere mittens - or about women, if it comes to that.   But if you can get my creative juices going when it comes to cashmere and mittens and women (and not necessarily in that order), you're on the way.

Provide the time.  This is the penultimate secret (another secret Mr Schwartz doesn't mention is include slightly more obscure words in your blog posts).   I try to give my creative person all the time in the world.   What does he do with it?  Fritters it away on Twitter or Facebook or writing blog posts of an inane nature, or checking his emails every few seconds, or playing another round of Scrabble online or seeing if anyone's paid him for anything in the last week/day/hour/second.   I can be a slightly tetchy boss at times.

Finally we have: Value Renewal.  Mr Schwartz says that human beings are not like computers; they can't be left on day and night flicking meaningless screen savers across their faces.   Human beings need to expend energy and then relax.  Expend and relax.  In the relax stage they recover their creative juices and get ready for another hack at the problem in question.   And at the same time, miraculously, while they're whiling away time making the fourteenth cup of tea/coffee, or playing 'fetch' with the puppy, or checking out the Guardian sports videos, all sorts of remarkable creative breakthroughs are taking place.   When that cup of coffee is drunk, or the puppy worn out, or the videos have proved to be not as exciting as the Guardian made them out to be, then you'll find that the brain is just itching to go, full of new insights, ideas, stuff you can use.  Or not.


Sometimes this creative incubation stage just doesn't get itself going quite as quickly as you'd like, and a whole day, or week or more can be whittled away while the incubation is going on.   However, you can fool the brain by working on some other totally unrelated project in the meantime, and give it a double job to do: incubate on project one and project two simultaneously. 

The brain may happily mix these up - and according to all creative writers this is a good thing.   Just make sure that at the end of the day that project 1 winds up with creative solutions to itself and not to project 2.  Unless your boss also thinks that's a good thing.  

Photo by velo_city on Flickr.com

The Vole

Sometimes dreams are so memorable you think, This must be significant.

I woke around four this morning, decided to go to the loo (as one does) and came back and eventually went to sleep again (as one hopes to do). I dreamt that our cat got stuck out in the laundry with a vole. How I knew it was a vole I have no idea, because when I thought about it after waking, I had no picture in my memory banks of what a vole actually looks like. It certainly doesn't look like the creature that appeared in my dream. [The picture at the left is of a vole, which is something like a mouse.]

Anyway, in the dream, I went into the laundry discovered the vole in there and...went for help. The vole in the dream was about the size of a mole, but not the colour. It was furry, and possibly grey or brownish. And it seemed to be in no hurry to go anywhere.

On going for help I went back to the front of the house, which, as houses in dreams do, had expanded sufficiently for there to be a large party going on with heaps of young people, some of whom I apparently knew. I found my wife and told her about the vole, and we headed back through the house, through the kitchen, (which, like the rest of the house had become rather large, and where there was some woman in charge who was not impressed to have anyone else in her domain) and out to the laundry. There we discovered that the vole had bitten the cat's tail off. In spite of having a kind of hole where the tail should have been, the cat wasn't particularly perturbed, which even in the dream I found a little surprising.

My wife, without hesitation, picked up the vole and dumped it outside on the back steps, discovering in the process that it had a collar around its neck, as though it was someone's pet. The vole sat on the steps, no more perturbed than the cat, and obviously not inclined to head for cover.

One could go on about there being some significance in everything being larger than life (or at least larger than normal) in the dream, from the vole to the kitchen to the front room. But the largeness of things wasn't the aspect that most struck me; the vole was what seemed most interesting.

Certainly I knew the word, 'vole,' from somewhere in the past, but it's not exactly a word I'd use in everyday speech. We don't have voles in New Zealand, as far as I'm aware, and I don't think I've ever seen one anywhere. What would cause the brain to conjure up this word - and attempt to picture it in my mind (even to the extent of providing a wrong image)? Why was there such a lack of angst about the cat losing its tail? And how come the laundry was the only room in the house that didn't grow larger than usual?

Dreams are intriguing, but I don't usually get left with such an interest in them....

Renovation v Learning

I was going to follow up my first foray into distance learning with a second course that, while still officially classed as distance learning, actually required me to attend a week's block course, and then do three essays over a period of three months. Sounds pretty straightforward, huh? I'm sure it is, but I decided to hold fire, as there seemed to be some other things looming on the horizon. The looming turned out to be kitchen renovations which have taken up my wife's energy hugely, and mine just a little less.

However, I haven't given up on the learning: my boss handed me next year's classes the other day, and there are some different options which I'd like to look into. It rather depends on what else happens around here, but I'd like to keep on with this stuff.

Of course, I could always go for an online degree at an overseas university, like Capella. Now that would be interesting. Whereas Otago has a relatively narrow range of courses available online (though they are courses that interest me) Capella appears to go all out over a wide range of subjects: World Religions, Chemistry, Organizational Theory are just three of the possibilities, and are ones you can sample. You can even enroll in a free online seminar, to see if it's up your alley.

Wow, I'm getting all excited here. (Though I haven't checked the cost out yet!)

The photo isn't of our renovation, but something similar. It was taken by Maree Reveley of Canterbury, New Zealand. Note the pink batts everywhere!

Ratatouille

Finally caught up with the movie, Ratatouille, at the cinema. We’d been going to see it in London, but missed the showing. However, it was on in Northampton, when we got there, so along with twenty other people we went to see it.

I think my only criticism of it is that it isn’t particularly funny – certainly not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s entertaining, and the storyline is fine, and there’s quite a bit of subtle humour, but you never kind of get caught up in a great laugh at any time.

That aside, the animation is brilliant, and the story takes a rather strange idea and manages to deal with its problems successfully. A rat who’s a self-taught cook? And who’s ability in the kitchen surpasses most other cooks? Okay. It’s totally improbable, but you manage to suspend belief and let it happen.

Overall, though, the thing that impressed was the technical excellence of the movie. The characters are wonderfully drawn, even those who exist primarily as caricatures. The backgrounds have a depth and warmth not always seen in modern animation, and the cast voicing the characters are top notch too.

I missed seeing most of the actors’ names when the credits were rolling, and didn’t realise Peter O’Toole had played the nasty food critic, Anton Ego. Janeane Garofalo, an actress I enjoy seeing in movies (but haven’t very often) played the only female cook in the kitchen, and someone called Patton Oswalt was the main character, Remy. I don’t know Oswalt’s name but he’s obviously done a lot of voicing for tv. Lou Romano, who plays the boy who pretends he’s a cook, is another actor who’s known more as a vocal artist than one who’s ‘seen.’ The gyrations his character goes through in the movie probably provide the biggest laughs.

I’d like to get a copy of the movie on DVD in due course: it’s one that would repay watching again, I think, to catch up with the details.

My office(s)

Sometimes readers like to know a bit more about the people who are writing to them, for example, what their office furniture is like.
At present I’m typing this at a kitchen breakfast bar, because I need the laptop to be close to a plug to keep it charging. But otherwise, while I’m in this house in the UK, I tend to work in someone else’s office, where there’s a proper computer desk, a proper swivel chair, and a fridge for the drinks.
Normally, back home in NZ, my office is a little different. The desk the computer sits on is an old office desk whose origins are unknown. Suffice to say it’s scratched and well used, and the drawers have sticky bits on the bottom. The drawers are full of everything that doesn’t fit elsewhere, and is small enough not to make the drawers unopenable.
The chair will be one of two sets of chairs we have around the house; it may depend on how recently we’ve had a load of family in as to whether it’s one of the regular chairs or one of the tall chairs (I prefer the former).
There’s a table for all the accumulated junk: mail, notes, books, bills, statements - you name it. There are at least two bookshelves on the floor, plus another one hanging on the wall. There are plenty of books.
On the desk are the computer, (a PC), two printers (one has been superseded by the other), various wires and cords, bits of paper, dust, and coffee cup stains.
Hanging on the window is one of my wife’s stained-glass decorations.
In the corner is a CD player, and there are two lots of CD shelving. But because I’m lazy, the same three CDs may play indefinitely. Or else I’ll listen to streaming radio, or the concert program.
There, does that suffice?

More on the subject of luggage

We arrived at the house we’re due to babysit on Wednesday to find the family just about to set off to Cromer for a few days’ camping. We were due to head back there ourselves because we’d left all our own luggage at my brother-in-law’s while we attended to a minor medical matter.
Anyway, the family’s car was full – and the daughter’s bag hadn’t even been put in. In a last minute plea, my niece asked if we could possibly deliver the daughter’s bag to Cromer for them. Of course we could. And then we saw the bag. It was virtually as big as the daughter herself, and may possibly have contained everything she possessed. We should have realized that you don’t go camping without all the things you might possibly need.
Whether she had the kitchen sink in there or not, I don’t know – she may have had two kitchen sinks, since the case was very heavy.
And talking of kitchen sinks, I’ve noticed something odd about the taps (faucets, if you’re in the US) leading into them. When I go to fill a kettle (jug, if you’re in NZ) from the taps, the cold water seems to be on the wrong side altogether. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m partly ambidextrous and do some things around the wrong way, but I have to reach over the top of the kettle to fill it, rather than being able to turn on the tap on my left, as I would at home. Maybe I need to try doing it round the other way – if I can. Although it feels a bit like trying to play golf right-handed to do that.

In the Kitchen

When we get back from the UK, I think we’re going to have to replace some of our cookware. Our longstanding non-stick pans are no longer non-stick, and our wok rocks on the fire. Our fry pan delights in sticking to anything that’s placed in it, and you wonder what you’re eating along with the fried eggs.
In the course of getting sorted for the trip, we’ve thrown out some older kitchenware, and stored away still more. The kitchen and its cupboards are a great place for things to hide away for years, unused or unopened; or opened and forgotten, or dusting the shelf with pepper, or cumin, or curry powder. We’ve had a good clean out, but it takes constant surveillance to keep a kitchen spick and span. Spick – there’s an interesting word we never use in any other context.
In fact, anyone who delights in the English language must enjoy kitchen words: skillet, poacher, chafing dish, griddle, spatula, trivet, to name just a few.

Spring Cleaning in Autumn

We spent Anzac Day doing the sort of chores that used to be called Spring Cleaning, but it’s actually Autumn here at present. We washed the bathroom completely, from ceiling to floor. We washed the kitchen from floor to ceiling and moved all the stuff that hadn’t been moved for quite a bit of time – I won’t say how long. Very satisfying, and tiring, and a good time for throwing out old things that we’d hung onto for no particular reason.
Each time we have a major cleanup we find things that have come to the end not just of their useful life, but of their life full stop. Why we’ve kept them at all up to this point is always a mystery, but it’s not a mystery we’ve ever been able to solve. There are always the pieces of pottery that we haven’t been able to throw out, though we have no possible use for them. There are always the various tools that have long lost their usefulness because some bit’s gone, or something doesn’t quite work any more. There are clothes that have stains on them, or don’t fit, or are threadbare, but they’ve continued to hang on the clothes hangers.
One of these days we may be able to get more ruthless, but it’s unlikely!