inspiring photo essay iii, pt. 3: new kitchen

You are presumably keen to learn how the kitchen ended up. You will be waiting some time. This instalment of the photo essay is what we Churchillians call the end of the beginning. It starts with a mournful moment, an elegy to something that has been lost and whose lights we will not see lit again in our lifetime. Here is the old fridge:

If you have never visited our flat, and the chances are you have not, you will not realise that while the sheer east face of the fridge hosted a beautiful and thought-provoking collection of photographs of different Christian summer camps sitting next to each other in a long row on a beach in Western Australia, the more verdant southern and northern flanks were devoted to pictures of me drunk with pretty girls. All that remains, as you can see, is bits of Blu-Tack. Is this a metaphor for my life? No.

Next, and very excitingly, we have a picture of the hole in the floor just inside the kitchen door. The hole that so many people have remarked on over the years. Well, look at it. It is just a tiny little hole.

'Kitchen door', you say. 'I wonder what the kitchen door looks like! If only a skilled photo-essayist were hard at work trying to give me a complete experience in some way!' But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is this picture of a kitchen door:

You will notice that it has that chicken wire in it, as if we lived in a dangerous mental home or edgy city centre school. No light through that window breaks, because the window cannot be broken. We have another such door leading into the lounge in case anyone comes to nick the basil and peppermint candle.*

Anyway, I am not saying that the floor didn't need some attention, just because the hole turned out to be surprisingly small. Here are some other pictures:



While I cannot at the internet's current stage of development let you touch what this floor was like to walk on, maybe the obvious damp and mould elements will give a crude sense that when things seemed spongy underfoot, it was not because the lino was particularly thick and luxurious.

This next picture is another one that will be more exciting to regular visitors than to newcomers:

You remember the greasy ceiling from part 1? Well, one of reasons for it was that the extractor fan didn't work. There was an easy solution for this (not looking up) but there was no easy solution for the shattering build-up of heat and smoke that took place whenever we (by which I mean 'I', because against the obvious odds I am a brilliant cook) made a meal, and which turned the kitchen into a sort of oily sauna. A follow-on effect was that we couldn't eat in the kitchen after cooking, which was one reason for the hamper build-up - that bit of the room had no other use, and we did need somewhere for the hampers. I am genuinely worried about where they will go, moving forward.*

By all of which I mean, the above picture is the old and broken extractor fan, on it's way to becoming an ex-extractor fan.

From next episode onward, I will be charting the start of the end of the reconstruction, leading on, possibly, to the end itself, if this is ever achieved. As a teaser, here is a preview of the first day of floor integrity, as demonstrated by the excited feet of my flatmate. Somewhere in this picture, who knows where, was once the floor-hole. The floor has had integrity for more than two weeks, and we have already acclimatised to the extent that integrity seems quite normal. If only politics were like this in some way! (Satire. It's like the sixties in here.)

*Any reasonable offers considered.