The story of the wooden spoon

This is a story. A story about a wooden spoon. I have had this wooden spoon for almost ten years. We have been through a lot together. There have been ups. There have been downs. But through it all, we have remained together.

When I was little, we used to walk to my Nana’s house every Sunday and she would make us lunch. She always made mince and something. I think it was potatoes and other vegetables. I wasn’t really paying attention. I just loved the mince. Maybe she cooked it especially well. I don’t know. I just know that my brother and I were obsessed with it, couldn’t get enough of it.

When she died, I was on my gap year in Africa and my dad and brother did all the sorting out of her stuff. When I got back from my gap year, I was immediately packing up my life again to move to university and my dad gave me my Nana’s cutlery to take. Amongst it all was a wooden spoon. One of the spoons she probably used when making our Sunday lunches of mince. It was sturdy and served me for almost anything I decided to cook (mostly pasta and sauces, as I was an unimaginative student).

When I left university for the summer and then actually ended up running away back to Africa and then coming back and going to a different university, again the wooden spoon and I found each other and made the journey to London together.

We survived halls of residence in tact and we moved into a flat just over the road from uni (the ‘lazy’ in my name becomes clear now) and lived with one close friend and two strangers. We found them on Facebook. They seemed fab. In fact, one of them disappeared and his room started to smell and his parents had to come and clean it out. And the other was nice but buggered off after a month or so.

I was not there the day she left but she obviously packed in a bit of a hurry. Or she intentionally broke my heart. Whichever it is, I have not forgiven her.

I came home that day and did not notice anything amiss. I hadn’t suspected she had a cruel heart made of stone. A few days later, I wanted to cook. I chopped something, I diced something else, I warmed some oil in a pan, I reached for my wooden spoon…. And it was not there. Panic swept over me. I looked around but it was not there. I realised where it must be but had no idea where it’s new home was.

Coincidentally, a girl I had lived in halls with in my first year at uni came over to say hi one day. She was still living in halls and mentioned that the girl who had moved out of our flat had moved in with one of her boyfriend’s friends, also in halls.

And so, the plan was put in place. They would wait until she had gone out one evening then sneak in, find my Nana’s wooden spoon and sneak back out, returning the wooden spoon to me asap.

And they did battle valiantly. They entered the battlefield, used their skills of stealth and sneakiness and retrieved the wooden spoon! Hoo! Rah!

Since then, I have guarded the wooden spoon carefully, not letting another silly careless mistake happen again. When I moved into a lovely massive converted coach house, it came with me. When I moved out a little while later, I carried in my backpack as I cycled to my new destination.

And now it sits happily in the utensil pot thing with the other utensils. It sometimes feels a little threatened by the presence of two other wooden spoons. Yes, two! But it knows those are but small wooden spoons, not comparable to it’s relative long-handled glory. It is the most useful when making things in a big pot, where the other wooden spoons, short-handled as they are, would fall into the food below.

Here’s to my Nana’s wooden spoon!

A few follow ups and a ladle of soup

A little while ago, I wrote a post called Sometimes I Think Too Much about a girl who was new in the area and had asked me to go for a drink, in a best-friend-date type of way. Some of you asked about how it had gone.

So here’s the story. The next time she came in, she mentioned needing a job, I said we had one. Two and two were put together and they equalled my new potential best friend and I working together. It was all ok for a few weeks. Then she got another job and left. And that was that really. Done.

Clearly I gave it way more thought than it warranted when she asked me out for a drink.

The second thing is that the local drunk who featured in “Are these donuts?” recently took a picture to a gallery nearby to have it reframed. It has been reframed now and, as the owner of the gallery is a friend and has a bad shoulder at the moment, he has asked me to help him go to Mr Red Wine’s flat and help him reframe it.

That’s right. I get to go INSIDE Mr Red Wine’s flat! I am beyond excited. I imagine it’ll be like one of those programmes called Grime Fighters or something, where cleaning companies go into old flats which are full of crap and pizza boxes with mould growing on them and rats running around.

My gallery owner friend has pre warned me that we will have to stand on Mr Red Wine’s bed to hang the picture and that it is alive with bed bugs. He also said I shouldn’t worry about just standing on stuff as I walk in the flat as there is no free floor space anyway.

It is going to be mental, I can tell.

Also, a few days ago, whilst at work, I was leaning over a bowl of soup to get something and there was a ladle in it with a hook on the end, for hanging it up with. Somehow the ladle hook caught on my apron and as I stood back up, I pulled the ladle with me, which was full of soup, and scooped it onto myself. It went all down my front and onto my Crocs and in the little holes and into my feet. Niiiiice.

I just thought you might like that little story.

The bus journey of memories

I get on, beep my Oyster card and sit down. I have a magazine with me, intending to read it, but I know deep down I won’t actually read it. Because this bus journey is one which runs through the memories I have made since coming to London. I’m always drawn to look out of the window.

It starts by the pharmacy where I would come and get Bio Oil every week or so after my operation last year. To try and make my huge hideous scar fade a little. Next I’m at the garage I used to walk to when I was allowed off bedrest, to try and get my energy back. There’s the bike shop where I wheeled my bike in despair one day when I had a puncture while cycling to work. It was a brand new bike and I felt very protective of it. I hung around nervously while they took it in the back to fix, trying to catch a glimpse of it. And there’s the shoe shop where I worked for six weeks before leaving because the manager was awful. And opposite is the Waitrose I don’t like because it’s laid out differently to the one I usually go to. There’s the pub I once went on a date to. One of those dates where you realise that someone is much more likeable from a distance. Moving on to the getting-to-know-you stage had been a mistake. The Oliver Bonas shop is next. I’ve never been in there. I had a friend who worked at one of their other shops. On the left is the running shop which used to be a running and cycling shop. I lost faith in them when they got rid of the cycling part of the shop. I was quite a regular visitor, used to get kitted out in my lycra there. Then here’s the garden centre on my right. I used to cycle down here for compost and seeds etc, when I started keeping an allotment in my final year at uni. Next is the Memories of Mortlake shop. I always look at it from my bike or from a bus window and think it looks lovely but have never been in. Next, we are at the traffic lights and the bus stop on the other side of the road is where I used to wait when I worked at a coffee shop where the shifts started at 5.30am. Once, while waiting for the bus there, an old man started mumbling and shuffling over to me and when I listened to his mumbles, he was asking me what colour my knickers were! I promptly set off walking fast for the next bus stop. Next we come onto a road which is flooded with early London memories. We’re passing my old university on my right and the council estate where I lived for two and a half years having loads of fun but with the worst landlord in the history of the world.

The university buildings cover the whole right side of the road until it ends at the road I used to cycle down when going into the park. I went through a phase of cycling around Richmond Park twice every morning first thing, before I did anything else. Next is the little cobbled road on my left where my uni friends and I would get a takeaway from Dong Phuong’s at least once a week, minimum. Next, up the road to the motorway and on my right is the other council estate where my friend, Sophie, and I viewed a flat before ending up at the one we passed earlier. We pass by Putney Heath and another council estate where Sophie and I viewed a flat with a girl we didn’t know, who never got back to us about whether she wanted to move in. It was a bit of a walk from uni anyway, so we opted for the one just over the road! Turn left and follow the motorway through Wimbledon Common, which I used to cycle across when the coffee company I worked for, needed me to cover shifts at the Wimbledon branch. I once got very very lost on the common for over an hour. I was quite frantic by the time I found a dog walker and asked him for directions. We’re now in Wimbledon Village and the bar where my friend, Robyn, brought me years ago, when I first came to her house and we had gone out dancing. We danced to Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. I had learned the dance moves from the video and we did them, over and over. Down the hill and approaching Wimbledon station, where we dropped Joe off to get the train, before going to the bar I just passed. We turn before the station and it starts to get into unchartered territory. We pass through Southfields, where I thought for years that my friend Jay lived. She would always leave early in the evening to get home on time and I wondered why she was being so over-cautious. After all, she just needed to jump on the one bus…. I think it was Sophie who pointed out that she did not live down the road in Southfields. She lived significantly further away in Southall…. Oops! Well it’s all south, that’s what I say. We go through lots of areas which are unfamiliar until we hit Tooting, and the cafe on my left where I once met Joe so we could go and explore Tooting, to report back to a friend who was soon to move to a campus there from abroad. And the restaurant shortly after where I met an old uni friend for dinner a few months after my operation, still feeling a bit fragile. This is where I get off, to do a bit of exploring and to make some more memories.

A girl I once lived with

I once lived with a girl who was puzzling, to say the least. I got to know her because she worked near a place where I worked. She seemed really great and friendly. She was moving out of her room in a house in an area quite far away and looking for something closer to work. Someone in the flat I lived in was moving out. It seemed perfect. She moved in and it was going to be great fun.

That’s when I noticed some things which had seemed fairly minor before. The main one was that she didn’t know how to communicate unless the conversation was a) about her or b) something she could turn around so it was about her.

To have a conversation that was about something else, something apart from her immediate situation, for example, about the current situation in the Middle East, or which political party is in power, or how the recession has affected the country, was alien to her. She froze. She’d join in while it was at the stage where she could still offer something about herself but as it drifted further and further away from her and became about something else, she’d freeze. She’d sit there, looking at each of us, panic in her eyes and eventually just slope off to her bedroom.

Occasionally, she’d make a desperate last ditch attempt to bring the conversation back to the earlier subject of herself. The result was as follows….

“So do you think they’ll make a coalition then?”
“Yeh, maybe. But who will they go with, Conservative or Labour?”
“I think Labour. Isn’t it funny how they have the power now because….”
“I’M GOING TO MAKE LEMON CUPCAKES TOMORROW!”

Silence….

Awkwardness….

“Um yeh, it’s funny about how the LibDems have the power to decide now, who they want to team up with…. Um…”
“…Yeh.”

If myself or any of the other flatmates had friends over, she’d come in the room, because she obviously wanted to join in but didn’t know how. So she’d just sit silently watching everyone, trying to figure out how to join in. It was close to impossible to include her in a conversation (unless it was about herself or she could make it about herself) so attempts to help her into things were wasted. She’d just watch for a while, then leave.

Eventually she started coming in from work and running straight from the front door to her room. She refused to speak to me at home for weeks, yet would speak to me at work like nothing was wrong! I’d go in her shop or she’d come and get a tea at the coffee shop where I worked and she wouldn’t mention the fact that she wouldn’t speak to me at home.

If I had stuff to ask her about the flat, I’d ask her at work, money for bills etc.

She once shouted at me because I mentioned something about cleaning, which she seemed allergic to. Instead of responding to my suggestion of making a rota for cleaning to make sure everyone was doing some (she never did), she said: “I’M JEALOUS OF YOU AND ALL YOUR FRIENDS!”

How do you respond to that? You suggest a cleaning rota. She says she’s annoyed with you because you have friends and she’s jealous.

It got to the point where she hated having to be around us so much that she just ordered take away, rather than come in the kitchen for even a second to get food. There’d be a knock, a scurry of feet, the smell of pizza and a scurry of feet back to her room. She also never brought the leftovers to put in the fridge. She’d just keep it in her room, all nice and warm, and dig in the next day.

I feel like I might be making it up because it sounds so odd, but honestly, it’s a true story.