The kitchen

There are plenty of ways in which I wish I could be more like other people. Working from home is a classic example.

Most people I know view this as a golden opportunity to multi-task and none of those tasks involve anything approximating to work. They tell me that there are far better alternatives; you can take in some daytime TV, catch up on the laundry, tidy up, do a spot of surfing, the opportunities are endless. There are more exotic pursuits, too - Mikey regularly jokes about having a "three wank day" when he works from home, Gemma's days out of the office are the frequent subject of smutty insinuations about afternoon delight, only some of them from me. They have a lot to do with the fact that her boyfriend is often at home during the week. But I can't seem to do any skiving.

It is the only area I've discovered, in fifteen years of what you could loosely describe as a career, where I appear to have some kind of work ethic. I should be popping into town for lunch, working wirelessly from a coffee shop, living in the kind of continental gleaming badly-dubbed world you only see in Vodafone adverts. By contrast, I hunch over the laptop for hours, unable to concentrate on anything else, not even getting up to put the kettle on. Apart from the occasional phone conversation there is no sound whatsoever; the simple act of putting music on in the background would feel like cheating.

Consequently, it's gone one before I shuffle into the kitchen in my pyjamas to think about lunch. It's pretty much the smallest room in the flat and everything about it is far from ideal. It's pokey, badly ventilated, badly laid out, doesn't have any natural light and there are nowhere near enough cupboards and shelves. But we didn't realise that; we had fallen in love with the living room by then, all that space, the high ceilings, the enormous sash windows, the daylight flooding into a lounge we were already beginning to imagine ourselves in and had mentally started to populate with furniture. Compared to that, the kitchen seemed an almighty irrelevance. Besides, it had granite work surfaces, and I was easily impressed by that sort of thing.

Some houses are like some people, you latch on to the things you like and by the time you realise everything isn't perfect you're stuck. Of course, some other houses are like some other people. You know you won't be interested the moment you clap eyes on them but you still have to make enthusiastic noises because somebody is showing you round and you've come all that way, and then afterwards you sit in the car with your wife saying "who in their right mind would be happy with that? I’d go mad if that was my life."

Away from the hum of the traffic on the main road, the kitchen is quieter still than the living room. The radio is not on – it only goes on when she’s in the kitchen, and normally I snap irritably at it until she rolls her eyes and switches it off. Now and again, they play an old jazz track and she and I dance round the slightly sloping slate floor until I start to feel awkward. Sometimes that happens sooner than others, but it remains the only time that I dance these days.

There is a noise though, and I can’t place it at first. Opening one of the cupboards I can hear a high-pitched ringing, like the tiniest bell, coming from within. Two of the glasses in there are touching, making the slightest of connections, and it’s the sort of sound where once you hear it you can’t hear anything else. Vexed, I start to move them, separating the champagne saucers, repositioning highballs, trial and error, hunting for the source of the sound without any success. It’s still going. I would have to change everything, take them all out to get to the bottom of it and I can’t face that. The sound taunts me as I close the doors and I wonder if maybe I can get used to it.

I ought to get used to the rice on the kitchen floor, too. I was struggling with opening the packet the night before. "I’ll get you some scissors." she said, watching as I toiled away without any success.

“You know what’s going to happen in a second.” I said. “It will split open and go everywhere.”

When it did, almost exactly a second later, it was as if I had predicted an unavoidable future rather than described the consequences of my own clumsiness. I’m good at that, nothing is ever my fault. It’s always somebody else’s responsibility, or else just the cosmos conspiring against me. We both laughed at my stupidity, me more than her, and I think she was a bit baffled that I found it so funny. I did my level best to sweep it up with a dustpan and brush but looking now I can still see tiny flecks of my failure to catch it all. Nothing is ever perfect, and I need to get better at facing that.

This room is full of things I never use. In some cases I’m not at all sure what they are for. We gave the coffee machine away – I knew what that did - but there are definitely objects lurking in cupboards that I don’t think have been touched since we moved in. The contents of the cupboard under the sink frighten me; I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find chemical weapons in there. And yet I couldn’t throw any of this accumulated flotsam out. I’m worried that I’ll need it at some point, that one day a moment will come when I might be punished for my willingness to take unmarked carrier bags to the ungrateful hunchbacks in the charity shop. They never say thank you, and I always want to say “Look! This is good stuff! A lot of people would have kept this.” I’ve never properly learned that two wrongs don’t make a right.

The indigestion medicine is in a bottle in the cupboard, next to the soy sauce. It doesn’t matter that things are in a location that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, provided I know where to find them. Everything could do with a clean, and yet it’s an oddly comfortable place to be.

I stand at one of the work surfaces and slice some olive bread. I’m disappointed when I look at the cross-section to find no olives there, no dark salty nuggets hiding within. This should be studded with them, and I feel short-changed. No matter; I cut off another slice. Again, nothing. I keep going, always trying again, always convinced that this is finally going to be the perfect slice, the one with all the good stuff in it that I’ve been waiting for. But it never is, so finally I admit defeat and head back to my desk and the to do list which, mentally at least, I never really left.

There are plenty of ways in which I wish could be more like other people, and working from home is just one example. Other people’s kitchens are full of food. Mine seems to be full of metaphors.