inspiring photo essay iii, pt. 6: new kitchen

Ian, half of the heroic figures who brought about what is increasingly being called 'The Miracle of the Kitchen', doesn't think you can have too many sockets. He has been involved in various renovations of various things, and sometimes someone has said there were too few sockets. Never too many.

I do not think we have too few sockets now, but I am not saying we have too many. This is the before picture for one of the two four-socket banks (also planned at this stage were two two-socket banks):



But then we decided that this was too many sockets, and we decided to keep our collection of dangerous futuristic pets with plastic legs in a wall-cavity.



Just kidding! That is what sockets look like before you put the plastic on the front.

Oh. I've remembered an interesting story about electricity that I am not quite sure how to illustrate. Here is a picture of what it looked like from the pool of where I went on holiday last year:



Electricity: it became increasingly apparent that earlier electricians in the house had done odd things. The main evidence of which was that when the electrician, a lugubrious non-English-speaker called, it seemed but this can't be the case, Mossad, fiddled with the sockets in the kitchen, he cut the electricity to my imposing bedroom/study (where the magic happens). The rest of the house was fine. My room was connected to the kitchen in some way analogous to the head bone being connected to the shin bone. Thus, periodically, Mossad would turn off my computer and I would lose whatever inspiring piece of writing I was working on at the time. I hope that the long-ago cowboy electrician can live with how much poorer he has made the world by the loss of these inspiring pieces of writing.

Here is the final form of the socket-set previously illustrated, also including a cooker switch (which is bizarrely in our experience connected to the cooker) and a light switch:



Here are two of the others as proof that I was not exaggerating for effect.





I never exaggerate for effect. I am like one of those Russian realist film-makers, assuming I have remembered what they were like, and it is like me.

Remember those pictures of the lounge/kitchenette? You must have thought that the extraordinary thing about those pictures, beautifully composed and Russian-revolutionary-realist as they undoubtedly were, was how little stuff seemed to be in them compared to what you would expect to find in a kitchen once famous for its fullness, especially in the department of hampers.

I have not given you a glimpse of the terrace-based storage solutions employed by the heroic Ian and Kathy (or, as the Kafka-esque B&Q delivery system insisted on calling her, 'Mrs K'). Here is part of it.



All you can really identify through the plastic is a salad spinner and a huge pot my parents bought me in the late nineties while I was still a student. It's a really good one, and bigger than any pot you own. My mother put a name tag round the handle, which you cannot see in this picture.

On the other side of the terrace:



In the foreground of this picture you can see some apples from Kathy and Ian's garden. In the end, the apples went rotten. This is a metaphor for the futility and absurdity of all things.

If you look closer at this section, you can see what is in at least one of these boxes.



Yes. It is our databases.