The Last Straw

Bracing myself for an afternoon at the Crazy White House I decided to go and see some Art; first to an exhibition of William Eggleston's photos, which inspired me to go mad iphotographing with my iphone. Spotting an Indian sweet shop I went in for some Egglestonesque pics, the owners were charming and talked to me about sweet-making. When I moved in for some close up shots I noticed that there was a jet black human hair embedded in one of the knobbley orange balls I'd been planning to buy.

I erased the hair image from my head with a visit to the Wellcome Collection which has some brilliantly weird stuff - and a great café.


Arrived at CWH feeling mellow and happy. Then the children came home and it was all shattered. Having recently been in a household with normal, happy, only slightly fighty, children, the awfulness of the CWH children is like having the world turned up to horror-movie screaming pitch. I’ve been wearing earplugs but still I hear them ordering the staff around and see them helping themselves to fistfuls of crap from the easily accessible sweetie drawer*.

When they do get brought to table for supper they are plugged into one of their many electronic games and the nannies bring other toys to distract them from the fact that they are eating. Two adults spoonfeed the children, I ask the five-year old why he won’t feed himself
I don’t want to look at the food

This is the nightly ritual, the adults plead and wheedle but the children rarely eat much. They get down from the table and are given more chocolate, the boy starts taunting the dog, his mother says

Don’t do that he doesn’t like it

No stop it look he’s trying to get away from you


This goes on for quite a long time, eventually the dog yelps and the child starts crying - I am so angry that I snap and tell him

And if I see you do that again I will bite off all your fingers

CWH Lady looks a bit shocked and I realise that I am questioning my previously held belief that Murder is Wrong so I say that I am sick and I really won’t be able to come in any more


*why do parents do this? It might be 'Natural’ and 'Organic’ but it’s still fat and sugar.

French Exchange

While I was living in France I wrote several posts about my neighbours who lived in the big house down the road, Mme B wears long stick-on nails, tattooed maquillage and six-inch heels, her husband has a military haircut and cashmere coats. Mme B is a mighty force to be reckoned with and quickly became my staunch ally, getting out her typewriter and bashing out firey letters of application, resignation and complaint on the frequent occasions that I needed them.

Her young and feckless son Jules, has arrived in London, his English is minimal and he needs help with job applications, I suggested we meet last Monday and sent him the time and address of a meeting place. He was very late and explained how he navigates the city using just the tube map, getting to a station that he thinks might be about right, then wandering around until he stumbles upon the place he wants to be. He’s been doing this for three weeks now. I told him to get a proper map and improve his English trés vite.

I sent Jules a rewritten version of his cv and he asked if we could meet again so that he could practise speaking English, we made a rendezvous for the hour before I started work today*

Blow me down if he didn’t do exactly the same thing again - arrived late because he’s using the bloody tube map, I was striding away up the street, swinging my shopping basket furiously, he saw me and ran after me, trying to keep up and apologise at the same time. I took the opportunity to practise my French rebuking vocabulary, English people rebuking in French (or at least me doing it) just makes French people laugh, he didn’t seem nearly chastised enough for my liking.

* I’m back at the CWH – DON’T give me a hard time, it’s just for a week and I need the money - it isn't improving my mood.

The Week In Review

Last Thursday
Email from Chanel Lady telling me that I was not chosen to cook for them this summer – Hoorah!

Email from Desperate Lady needing an emergency cook next week - Hoorah!

Friday
Decree Absolute at The Crazy White House
CWH Lady and I had a brief and unsuitable relationship, like one of those Britney Goes To Las Vegas ones. Once I’d announced that 'we could no longer go on with this madness', the last weeks of our affair became a peculiar tentative marriage of convenience, I needed her money and she couldn’t imagine surviving without a cook. I tried to be honest and constructive about why we were not meant to be but ended up saying a lot of ‘It’s not you it’s me’ kind of things like:
The British are so innately slovenly, I could never achieve your high South African standards*

there were so many things that I couldn’t even begin to say to her.

Smell is so important, yet I repeatedly fail to acknowledge this: Household odours are very distinctive; a mix of foodstuffs, heating source and cleaning products combined with children, laundry (often dirty) and pets; this household’s particular mixture set me on edge the minute I walked over the threshold.


Saturday
My husband comes to London and submits to weekend of eating, visiting curio shops and art galleries, concedes that cinemas seem more comfortable here and that it’s fun to look at art and other people and sundry weird stuff, says he will think about making second visit later in year.


Monday
Baby Sister and I meet up, I am initially drunk merely with freedom from CWH Lady, but then we go to Italian restaurant and try the Prosecco...

In the evening I make another attempt to appreciate Chekov, Three Sisters at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Am I the only person who finds this man an utter bore? The reviews called the production Lively, Modern and Bold, I saw irritating people moaning around a table and left at the interval.

Tuesday
Visit my cousin, we go for beans on toast at nearby café, he is blind and I suddenly become acutely aware of roadworks, wonky pavements full of deep puddles, stupidly placed bollards and dog shit.

Wednesday
Turn up equipped with supper for Desperate Lady (new client), she just wants nice food on the table. Her house has an Aga and a woodstove and smells of rice pudding, it makes me ache with pleasure.

I made an Easy Chocolate Mousse
Bring 300ml double cream to boil, take away from heat and add 200 grms of broken-up dark chocolate (70% cocoa), beat together until all chocolate melted.

Transfer mix to a bowl set over another bowl of iced water and add a further 300ml of double cream, whip up into soft peaks

at this point, personally I would stop and eat this now, but if you want to make a mousse out of it beat up 2 large egg whites in a separate bowl until you have stiff peaks, pour in 100 gm sugar gradually, beating all the while until you have soft meringue, fold this into the chocolate mix and eat as soon as you need to.

* that is quite true, I routinely have to clear a festering beast or toxic substance, such as lead shot, off the work surface before I can roll out my pastry, it is very easy to leave an upper class British kitchen in better condition than I found it.

Swimsuits In The Kitchen...

My days with Crazy White House Lady are nearly done and I have been looking for alternative employment. Agencies are sending me to meet potential clients, today I went to see an archetypal Chelsea couple who want a chef for their summer residence;

I had a very early appointment, Madam showed me in to their apartment, her Chanel suit made me think of the way I decorated birthday cakes as a child, her make-up and coiffure are solid enough to last a month if necessary, eyelashes mascara'd like black gerbera daisies, hair appears to be a safety feature.

She talks in the loud confident tones commonly heard in Harrods and at the better ski resorts. Her husband, grinning at her side, interjected occasionally;

People will come through the kitchen in their swimsuits you know

I will want to come in picking at the food – you have to slap my fingers


But mostly we are silent while she talks at length and I get lost in the details of the room and things like her fingers and earlobes which are encrusted with round knobs of jewellery, I suddenly heard her saying

...I move the table around a lot, sometimes it’s at one side of the room, sometimes the other and I often have it put out on the patio, there’s lots of tableware ...and flowers I love doing all the design...’

When it was over I walked up the road for breakfast at the Victoria and Albert Museum and ended up staying in the building until it was time for my date with CWH Lady.


Later I checked the small ads
This was one I thought I might go for

LADY REQUIRE FOR COOKING FOOD AND BODY MASSAGE

we are looking for a lady who can cook indian food for 1 time + body massage.

can be around 21-26
urgent require,
pay=£250 for cooking + £50 for transport between zone 5-6 + 150 Body massage.

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. This is a common scenario, 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 vs 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 mother'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 - 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  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 cousin 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.

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.

Communication Issues

My new client and I have been having hilarious misunderstandings this week, it is as though each of us is speaking in a language that sounds like English but is unintellible to the other.

Everybody’s version of a dish is unique but the first dishes I served in the Crazy White House weren’t at all what Madame had in mind. After a couple of tense episodes I suggested that Madame bookmark some of her favourite recipes in a few of her many cookery books, I would make these and thus get an idea about what sort of food they like eating.

The first recipe she handed to me is for ‘Spinach, Parmesan and Potato Soufflé’, I follow the recipe, it is delicious, Madame walks into the kitchen as I am withdrawing it triumphantly from the oven, she looks horrified, then tastes a bit and says;

It tastes of Parmesan, and it is green, I usually half the quantities for those things when I make it.