Robyn Anderson

This morning I put on shorts and a tee shirt. It was 19 degrees yesterday and I didn’t want to waste a precious drop of vitamin D. So what did I do this morning before the wind started to blow and after I’d chopped the mint down to size (stalks) and divested the lemon of many branches and last years crop? I went inside and cleaned the new oven. I thought it’d be a matter of chosing the self cleaning setting as I breezed through the kitchen. I have heard people scoff at this function and I could not for the life of me understand how the words self and cleaning used in tandem could be scoffed at. I loved it when my kids were self cleaning and so far, they haven’t let me down. When that word is applied to ovens I imagined it meant you were not up to your eyeballs in dodgy cleaning products scrubbing like a maid in Downton. Hahahahah. Two hours of self (pyrolytic) cleaning and yes, I did have some ‘ash’ as the book promised. That, I’m assuming was the chicken from last night’s tea that had to be roasted in an open pan. Everything else, from every other meal since the purchase of this oven remained in situ. And I still had to clean the racks! They took three of those steel wool scourers filled with chemico and a dose of highly inflammable oven cleaner and another maid from Downton Abbey with big strong arms and rubber gloves. Which were also a problem. I had a perfectly sized yellow glove on the left and the one on the right was purple and two sizes too big. I tell you, the things you find out during lockdown when you want to be outside weeding the strawberries while there isn’t a drop of wind.

I have a friend who wouldn’t want me to name her in case Big Brother finds out she’s alive, who never cleans her oven. Admittedly her oven is not set at eye level so you have to be pretty nosey to look inside it, but thats not the reason she never cleans it. She just doesn’t like cleaning ovens. So when the smoke comes out black and smelly, she trots off down to the shop and buys herself a new one. Now that’s what I call liberated thinking and is being taken under serious advisement.

Oh, I wanted to add a photo of my wonderful glowing crop of lemons but I couldn’t work out how to get it off my phone and onto this post. The sharing of information between my ‘devices’ was one of the main reasons I bought an expensive compatible phone. Now it’s just blown any fuses left in my brain.

If it wasn’t for Netflix I’d go and live in a cave. At least I wouldn’t have to clean the campfire.