CS-200

J is at this moment cleaning the kitchen. I deny it, but inside I feel quite strongly that the kitchen is my preserve. By and large I do the cooking and I do the washing up and clean the surfaces and I even wash the floor. When it needs it.
I remember a piece by Mil Millington on cutting the lawn. When he’d finished and put the mower away and was closing in on a cold beer and a lie in the sun, his girlfriend leaned out the window and asked him if he was going to do the edges. He said no. She asked why not. And he said after only a moment’s thought - and this is Mil’s genius - “Because it’s easier not to.”
Yesterday T was up, and J showed her the radio and asked what she thought and T said, “Chuck it, it’s disgusting.”
This is the kitchen radio. It’s been the kitchen radio, not just in this kitchen but in our house before, for about twenty years. You know how your parents had things, wooden spoons is a good example, that were worn and coloured in such a way as to be unique, so that they, your mother’s wooden spoons for instance, represented all wooden spoondom, they were the right and proper and in fact only wooden spoons there were. I remember the first time I saw a new wooden spoon in a shop, pale, symmetrical, no patina; not a wooden spoon at all really, or at any rate still-born. And then one day you realise that your things are the same, worn to uniqueness by use and time. Like the kitchen radio.
My attitude to health and safety in the kitchen is organic. All the work surfaces are clean, the bits that matter anyway, the hob and backplate and sink shiny, the walls white. But I know that at a scale smaller than the human eye can see, it’s a battleground. And I’m happy for it to be that way. Live and let live. Let them dispute among themselves, those microbial organisms. The danger comes, to my mind, when you set about the place with biocidal chemicals. Then only the evil survive.
The radio - it’s right against the window, jammed against the bread bin, behind the old ice cream container we put the stuff for the compost in, and pretty close to the hob. And the thing about a radio is that it’s electronic, delicate, you can’t keep washing it and scrubbing it, water will get in through the knobs and levers.
In the sitting room we have a hi-fi, all the shit, bi-wired speakers with aramid drivers and an amp like a slab of basalt. But you know those short moments when music takes you over with gorgeous happiness, for me those often happen on the kitchen radio, it’s the ambience, the warm light, the red wine, kids under the feet, stuff on the flame chuckling and gurgling. It’s an Aiwa, heavy black plastic under the glaze, green and purple trim, exquisite. We’ve had four or five radios since, and they sounded like cheap toys.
And nothing was actually growing out of it.
They didn’t throw it away, of course. They are generous and sensitive beings, not brutes. J has burnished it down to its carapace with OzKleen Kitchen Power and it still seems to work. And this afternoon I’m going to put a neat shelf up behind and above the kitchen door and it can live up there. I’m a bit worried about the damp, the kettle will be down below. But what I was going to do this afternoon was to change the whole archaic ballcock system on the toilet, the old one punctures new washers within a week of me putting them in and water runs down the outside wall though you can’t really see because of the wisteria so it’s not that vital. And jobs like that usually take about a week because of the mismatch between the old corroded fittings and the new polythene ones. So I'll put up a shelf for the radio instead.