Top Tip: Peel The Base Off A Saucepan In Just Several Hours

Put a pot of beans on then go to sleep. This has the special bonus of making the house smell funny.

Pot Heads

The Australians reckoned that having come as far as England they might as well 'do Europe' while they were at it, they have disappeared, leaving me alone in the Pop Flat with Felicity. It feels like we're doing a middle-aged remake of an 80s comedy series.



Felicity gets back every evening from a job that she loathes, she deals with the horror by smoking her way through a large amount of marijuana, then she gets really hungry and prepares a late feast – usually something involving lots of vegetables and rice. The only pot big enough to hold the quantity of food she thinks she'll want to eat has part of it’s side broken off along with one of the handles. There's a lid from a different pot that sits on top of the one-eared pot and I've got rather fond of the sight of this odd pairing.








So imagine my sadness the other day when I saw that the mismatching lid, had broken in half – but it's ok - I’ve mended it, we only had string and sellotape in the house, I think the string will work best.

News From The Pop Flat

From Monday to Friday, I live at the top of a house in London. When I moved in at the beginning of last month, the lower floor was occupied by Half a Pop Group and their recording studio, they also have a Child who slept in the room next to mine - I’d just got used to the Child sidling into the room where I happened to be and giving me a good staring. Then, ten days ago, Half a Pop Group took the Child, left London and some Australian musicians turned up to replace them and use the house and recording studio.

I’ve heard the piano playing and caught fragments of song, but now they’re moving closer. Today I heard high-pitched, wailey singing in my kitchen and knocking sounds, a bit like DIY, I wondered if a partition was going up.

I gave up trying to find a use for Facebook and went to investigate. A tall man with spiky hair was puffing away on a big joint, his trousers were really tight and short and very low slung, he must’ve bought them when he was twelve, I wonder if he loved them so much when he got them that he has worn them constantly and now he's grown and can’t get them off. he looked up and beamed when he saw me:

Hello Darling

Hi, you got everything you need?

Yeah Rockin’

What you up to?

I'm putting some drum tracks down

I can now see that the knocking noise is coming from a digital drumming device connected to his laptop, a girl’s singing drifts up the stairs.

She’s got someone in, so I’ve got to get out the way

OK, d’you want some tea?

Yeah Rockin’

New Eatery - Opening Soon!

Over the weekend I took a tour of the neighbourhood with my man and we noticed that a restaurant we used to frequent had been renamed, there was a board out the front with the words BRING YOUR OWN written on it.

We looked at each other

Bring your own ...???

Bring your own ... money?

Bring your own husband?

then we got it at the same time
Bring your own dinner!

If it turns out not to be that kind of restaurant we have decided that we will jump into this obvious gap in the market - a restaurant for all those people who know what they like.

We're going to make it 'All You Can Eat' and 'Self Service' and for people who like buffets we'll have trestles for them to put their stuff on.

We'll provide the drink.

Lucky Dip Dinners

After my last post I thought about how I've often gone to countries not speaking the language at all and have simply pointed at parts of the text on the menu in the hope that I was choosing things that would end up resembling a meal.



This made me go and dig out the sketchbooks where I'd made notes in an attempt to try and learn from these experiences, a way to remember the words for 'cat giblets' or 'face of pig' for future reference. The page above was made during a typical 'point-and-shoot' dining experience. This was in Budapest in 1992, I had just got a degree in colouring-in from Brighton. Not knowing what else to do, I managed to get a grant to spend a term at the Hungarian College of Art and Design in Budapest, they didn't make me very welcome and refused to let me use the school facilities so I spent my days in the city's cheap eating and drinking places filling sketch books and taking photos. I dug them out this weekend and fell down a rabbit-hole of memories:





At the end of my residency, to fulfill the terms of my contract I had to put on an exhibition of my work, so I invited people to come to my room and look at these sketchbooks, one of the college tutors edited an arty magazine called Magyar Narancs and several months after I had left town he put a little feature in the magazine, a photocopy was posted to me along with a translation of the text to the left of the image


An Engish girl, taughened(sic) by the salty air of Brighton, drifted into the Trabant-smoked streets of Budapest. She sat into the low-flying bakelite, tiled Budapest; she was flying as a black butterfly between the battered houses. Her drawings, like the magazine illustrations of the thirties, are travel drafts about the magic. Metaphors, jotted down on mustard-stained grease-proof paper; cooked-sausage-sketches. Espresso-bar tables, Dobos-cake crumbs on them, are sweeped into the sketchbook.

The Tyranny of Choice

When I go to France, my favourite places to eat are the lunchtime Routier Cafés, frequented by truckers. A chalkboard outside states simply that there is a menu du jour, the price is chalked up and whether or not vin is inclus - no further details. I sit down, food appears, no looking at menus, no decisions, no effort – heaven!


I tried to get breakfast in a diner in America once and never did it again, the milk choice alone includes semi, demi, skinny, fatty, frothy, flat and not milk at all. By the time the waitress started on the bread list I just wanted to go home and put my own toast on.

Most people who hire me simply want the food to happen, fridge and freezer full and a lovely surprise on the table at dinner time – what’s not to like?

The Crazy White House Lady doesn’t see things this way, for her, endless choice is the point of money. Every day I make suggestions for her evening supper, all of which are rejected, then she leafs through recipe books, makes a decision and goes away - just for a while, I imagine her sitting on her bed all clenched and agonising;
mashed potatoes or roast or should we have rice ... do I really want my fish fried...?

after about half an hour has passed she comes back down and asks me to make a different menu.

CWH Lady likes the idea that she is empowering her five-year-old by asking him what he wants for his supper. I see quite a lot of this and find that when children are told they can have anything they want to eat they usually want the same thing day in day out, I make chicken and broccoli every day for this child but we still have to go through the ritual of his mother listing possible dishes and pleading with him to try something else, I watch the child during these performances and see that like his mother, he is torn by the anxiety of decision-making and the enjoyment of all this power.

*I have agreed to stay another couple of weeks with CWH Lady, I fear that we have developed a sort of mutual Stockholm Syndrome

war poster found here

How Much Housework Is Too Much?

I thought I knew about obsessive housekeepery, I was raised in the sort of house where your coffee cup was whipped away for washing up the second you set it down - finished or not and we warned visitors not to stay too still if they didn't want to get dusted. My parents also like taking pre-emptive action against mess and wear, when I visited them over the weekend I admired my stepmother's ingenious Bacofoil candlestick protectors – no unsightly wax drips in that house!

I am serving out my final days at The Crazy White House (an average-sized 4-bedroom house, occupied by two adults and two children) which appears to exist solely for the purpose of being cleaned - I am wondering if it is, in fact an art piece or a scientific experiment that is secretly being filmed in timelapse to see how long it takes to polish, hoover and wash a house away. This is the regime:

Every day: at 7.30am Nadia arrives, she does breakfast and starts cleaning the house, she is there for 12 hours, by the time I arrive at 3pm she has started the second floor washing of the day.

Every Friday: a second cleaner arrives for the day and the house gets extra cleaning

Every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon: someone comes to do laundry

One of the reasons I am leaving the CWH job is that I fear that I have either fallen into a hallucinatory parallel universe or gone snow blind; every night before I go home I look around the kitchen, I have cleaned and scrubbed and swept the floor - it looks, to my eyes, dazzlingly new. After my first week Nadia said to me

You must make the kitchen cleaner before you go at night, I only have an hour and a half to clean the kitchen in the mornings when I come in.

Living Conditions II

The Half A Pop Group living situation suits me very well. It is the front half of the band that I am living with, she is the Sexy Vixen who sings and is in charge of everything and he is the cerebral-looking one with the guitar. They have a 3-year-old child and a recording studio in the house and a top floor flat which is almost self-contained, Felicity is the other lodger with me in the flat, she is a voluptuous woman in big skirts who laughs often and loudly and we share the flat with The Child who sleeps here and comes into the kitchen to stare at me or into my room to show me how to operate the television.

I chose the Pop Flat partly for it’s lack of stuffed toys, overflowing ashtrays and mad people but mainly because of the art, the Vixen’s family are artists and the place is full of brilliant pictures. As a household we all seem to find similar things tragic/funny and our Squalor Tolerance Levels are compatible.

Actually Felicity is hugely messy and when I return from making supper for OCD Lady the Pop Flat kitchen usually looks like a war zone but I find this strangely comforting after an evening at the Crazy White House*.

I haven’t done any cooking in the Pop Flat since I arrived, the kitchen cupboards are a repository for the stuff Half A Pop Group couldn’t quite bear to throw out; assorted bowls, novelty egg cups and mismatched items of Tupperware, but no plates or ovenware and only one saucepan. The cutlery drawer contains forks, a large spoon, some gaily coloured plastic feeding spoons and used toothbrushes. When I get in from work all I usually need is a stiff drink, but on Sunday I’m getting a visit from my fellow blogeuse and cousin-in-law Ange so I have just gone out and bought a pot to cook in.

*BREAKING NEWS So much to say about Life in the Crazy White House but it was all too repetitively grim to relive on the blog, however I have just tendered my resignation so now I might be able to find the whole thing entertaining – and tell you all about it.

Living Conditions I

Currently I spend my weekdays in London and go back home for the weekend. Last autumn I house-sat a friends art collection in her swishy pad in West London for a couple of months. This was sort of great but also a bit tense, the immaculateness of the pale carpets and the fragile and valuable Works of Art made me nervous, I wore latex gloves and a hairnet in the flat and put paper on the sofa before I sat on it.

At Christmas my friend returned to guard her own art so I needed to find alternative weekday accommodation. I placed a couple of very brief ads asking if anyone had a room to let. I’m a bit out of touch with this sort of thing, but is it normal to reply to 'Accommodation Wanted’ ads with full details of one’s divorce arrangements?

This person (who gave no name or other indication of identity) lives about as far away as one could get from the area I specified

Hi,
I am living in canary wharf in a 1 bed apartment means 1 bed room and living room , if you need you can take my bedroom whereas I am happy to adjust in living room till march 1st week.

Amount will not be a problem , can talk about that if you like and see the apartment.

your comfort is my main concern

take care

thanks

I spent a weekend visiting the best of the proposals, all of them were astonishing in one way or another, one chain-smoking care worker showed me a tiny bedroom full of teddy bears, the rest of the house contained a lot of purple sculpted-pile carpet and was strewn with empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. The next flat had a large splashy bloodstain in the hallway which put me off a bit. And then there was Polly;

Polly sent me a very long response detailing the fabulousness of her Chelsea apartment, the 'spacious living room' with 'gorgeous soft furnishings', the 'outside patio for barbeques in the summer', the 'well-equipped kitchen' and the 'vast bath for sumptuous soaking after a hard day’s work'. I was suspicious but I had to see it.

I found the address and tinkled the wind chime by the door of a basement flat, the door opened onto a small grotto-like space partitioned into 'rooms’ with thin bits of board, the smells of cat wee and mould were overwhelming. To hide the mouldy areas Polly had recently glued bits of brightly-coloured fabric over the window sills and skirting boards.

To emphasise the lack of space, the flat was decorated with strings of Tibetan prayer flags and crammed with garage-sale scavenged items, including 2 washing machines and a tumble drier. Polly had rigged up some wobbly ceiling-hung storage systems to accommodate bread makers, coffee makers, kettles and assorted broken pots.

My first step through the front door put me in the centre of the 'kitchen’ which consisted of a doll-sized sink unit, the cooking facilities being an electric two-ring, Baby Belling hob set on the drainer, I didn’t notice it until Polly pointed it out because the hob and sink were covered with saucepans and plates,
Look! she pointed up at one of the perilously crammed shelves
there’s an ice cream-maker - we can make ice cream!

Polly has many cats, they peered at us as she insisted I went into the bathroom, squeeze my way between the bath and sink and inspect the 'designer’ loo seat, the front of the lavatory was right against the back of the bath - to use it one would have to sit sidesaddle.

I’d been there 5 minutes, I was feeling very queasy and said that I had to leave.

I went out of the door and Polly followed me, in the rain, wearing fat pink felt bootees,this pale pixie-like person bobbed alongside me keeping up a stream of information about her health problems as I strode towards the station, grabbing my arm and telling me to look in the windows of the local restaurants and shops so I could see what a great neighbourhood we were in.

In the early hours of the next morning Polly sent me a text suggesting that I could stay for the first month for free.

I resisted this bargain and have chosen instead to move in with half a pop group for a little while...

Nose Job

Second week of the new job and I'm still finding the going tough. I won't bore you with the details, I did that to a friend last night over a bottle or two of red wine.

I staggered home and tried to get ready for bed but tripped myself up taking my jeans off. I dropped on my knees then nosedived into the bedroom carpet, there was a crunch, then blood. Pity there were no spectators because it would've been very funny to watch.

I look like I've been in a fight, which is not a good look for an exclusive private chef.