A Kitchen with Knobs On

Although it felt like ages, it was less than two weeks between completion of the main kitchen fit and the final arrival of our knobs. Since we elected to retain our AEG fridge and freezer (the only appliances left from the original kitchen), we also chose the Franke "silk steel" sink and tap, and decided therefore to continue this theme in the knobs and cup handles, which are all brushed steel.

It's hard to take an impressive photo of the kitchen from any angle, with it being so long and narrow. I've been wondering whether it would be possible to get hold of some "photo stitching" software and take a row of pics at 90deg to the units, ending up with a long photo of each side, but I've experimented with PhotoSynth and the results are patchy at best. It doesn't cope well with panoramas in small spaces, apparently, so these will have to do.

So this final stage was completed on Thursday 20 October, the day before we left for the Lakes. Apart from the small section of granite upstand under the boiler cupboard, some short lengths of oak beading around those bits of wall not covered with cupboards (which we'd intended to fit skirting board to, but changed our minds), and fitting a proper door stop to replace the lump of wood that's behind the door right now, it's... ALL DONE! :o)

Leave to take Leave

On the morning I was due to return to work - Monday 17 October - I logged in to find a reply from my manager to my urgent email informing him of our emergency visit to Toronto and that I'd be off for the rest of the week. Company guidelines in the event of the death of a close relative allow five days compassionate leave, but in view of everything that's happened in recent months, he had replied that if I needed longer I should just take it.

This falls into the category of "things I don't need to be told twice." I replied with thanks, reset my Out of Office message, and logged off for the rest of the week. And since we were due to spend all of the week after THAT on holiday in the Lakes, I'll have been off for three weeks by the time I go back. Sadly, Nikki's firm aren't quite so generous when it comes to compassionate leave.

Shirley Margaret Fletcher

I've been thinking (worrying) about this post since before we flew to Toronto. Knowing I should write something, knowing that it would be hard. That it could be upsetting, both to write and to read. The best I can do - ALL I can do - is to relate how she appeared to me. I knew her for a little over ten years. We first met in 2000 when I visited Toronto. Meeting your partner's parents for the first time is never easy, no matter how old and experienced you are. But in this case the circumstances were perhaps even less auspicious than normal, there being the unspoken possibility that I would be spiriting her daughter off to live with me in England. It came back to me later that Shirley had said something like "I wanted to hate him, but I couldn't. He's such a nice guy."

So the first thing I learned about Shirley was that she was a very astute judge of character ;o)

Some people are an open book, others more guarded. Shirley could appear quite abrasive, but if I were to continue with the book analogy I'd say she was like a book that was bound in cactus, but turned out to be a heartwarming story of infinite warmth and humanity when you eventually read it. Whether on this side of the Atlantic or that she was always pleased to see us, always generous to a tee (paying for the overwhelming majority of our meals out no matter where we were, and brooking no argument on the subject), and always made sure we had a full supply of breakfast bagels and coffee when we went there, and that she brought a good supply of Riceroni and pumpkin pie mix when she came here. And marmalade. Oh that homemade marmalade! There's nothing like it on Earth, and the frighteningly meagre supply now sitting in our fridge is the last there will ever be. I hardly dare spread it on a single slice of toast, but when I do - and for as many times as I do - I'll offer up a silent prayer of thanks. I tried many times without success to persuade Nikki to make it while Shirley was still with us. Now I just have to hope that the recipe is one of those that "just works" without her magic touch. What are the chances?

My Inbox is considerably less busy these days too. Shirley was well-connected, email-wise, and the constant stream of jokes, funny photos, or inspiring PowerPoint slide decks that flowed from her was a regular and welcome source of laughs, gasps and awwwwws.

But inevitably our opportunities to get better acquainted were limited by both time and distance. Listening to Nikki, Paul and Stewart relate tales of their childhood in her house, reading the emails of condolence from her widespread friends and acquaintances met on her many cruises, seeing the effect of her passing on everyone we came into contact with on our visit, brought it home just how much she was loved by everyone who knew her, or whose lives she touched.

"It's a great life, John, if you don't weaken," she regularly said to me. And until the very end, she never did. A remarkable woman in every way.

Should Not Have Got On This Flight Tonight

Not being one to like a lot of fuss, Shirley had always said she didn't want Nikki to fly over in "emergency mode" whenever she shuffled off the mortal coil. Since she wasn't here to argue, we went anyway. The first flight we could book, Tuesday 11 October, arrived at Toronto Pearson mid-afternoon. A few seconds of Neil's reaction to Nikki's arrival would have been enough to convince anyone we'd done the right thing going over. We stayed 5 days, flying back Saturday night on the red-eye and arriving back in Manchester on Sunday morning.

The trip was a surreal mix of doing the things we would have done on a normal visit, only without Shirley, and in the midst of dealing with our grief as best we could, trying to help in any small way to organise lawyers, Neil's long-term care, Shirley's possessions, and comply with her last wishes. One of the most unusual of these was to donate her body to medical research. She'd been inspired to do this by a friend who passed before her, and although not having the closure of a formal funeral service proved a little hard for Neil to deal with, everyone was very glad that Shirley's final generous gesture was accepted by the University of Toronto medical research centre (not all are).

In my experience people often talk, or joke, about "donating their body to science" but very few have the courage or conviction to really do it.

Ups and Downs

I'm in danger of writing more apologies for hiatuses (and possibly apologies for incorrect plurals of 'hiatus') on here than 'real' blog posts this year. It's been a year for interruptions. Or to put it another way, a shit year. One with the usual ups and downs, but where the downs have tended to overshadow the ups. Which only underlines the seriousness of the downs, because the ups - especially where our house is concerned - have been huge. First the shed (whose saga fell in the middle of the Great Blogging Hiatus and hence has never been told) and now the kitchen.

So when we left the kitchen, we were knobless but otherwise to all intents and purposes complete. The appliances plumbed in and working; cooker and hob connected and working; fridge and freezer back where they belong; lights all shining brightly. All that remained was to empty the contents of the dozen or so plastic crates piled up in the dining room which comprised the totality of The Kitchen Before (crockery, dry & tinned goods, etc), decide where it would live in the new scheme, and follow it up with everything else we own that could possibly, legitimately, live in a kitchen (glasses, decanters, bottles of booze, candle supplies, the old Kenwood chef - hardly ever used - that has been languishing in a forgotten cupboard since we moved in, ...) thus freeing up space in the last ground floor room to be given The Treatment.

And that's how we spent our time for the whole weekend following completion. In between cooking on The New Hob, we washed and dusted, carried and discussed and packed away, opened and closed the cupboards and drawers with their temporary handles (wood screws covered with masking tape) until by Sunday afternoon the dining room was looking much more like a dining room than it has for the last three months, and everything was put away. Not that I could find anything, but it WAS all put away.

Inevitably there was some jousting for position. No, we can't put the bean-to-cup coffee machine under there because we can't get to the reservoir to fill it with water. No, we can't put in on that side either, because the water level indicator is against the wall and we can't see how full it is. And so on.

That was an Up, that weekend. We got a lot done, felt very happy with it all, and excited about the new kitchen. The following morning, Monday 10 October, just after I'd returned from ferrying Nikki to work I took a phone call from Paul to say their Mum had passed away. Downs don't get much bigger, or come much quicker, than that.

Kitchen fit: Day 14

A day of surprises. A day that, I thought, would be wall-to-wall painting, but which turned out to be hardly any painting at all and other much more exciting things like downdraught extractors, induction hobs and putting the fridge and freezer back into place.

Neff induction hob, with de Dietrich extractor (in "deployed" mode). Ooooh. Finally, after all the waiting we can... er... boil a pan of water. But! Never was boiling a pan of water *quite* so similar to being on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Touch sensitive surfaces and a whizzy little dial thing that is held in place with a magnet and taps and spins to control the hotplates.

The extractor raises itself out of the depths with the touch of a finger and sinks back down again when it's finished sucking.

All this more than satisfies my life-long fascination with knobs and buttons.

Nice to have the fridge and freezer back in the kitchen too, even if it does mean that for the next three or four days we'll be performing a reversed version of the dance we first started back in July. Now the usable cooking facilities are in the dining room and all the food is in the kitchen. Back then it was t'other way round. Not for long though.

Well, I SAY not for long, but as we discovered today it'll be slightly longer than expected. Here's a photo that gives you a bit of a clue, even though the main reason for including it is to give you another perspective on the lovely new hob (purr, purr)...

See the problem? Yes, that's right. No knobs. No, I mean on the cupboards and drawers. The hob is supposed to be knobless. The drawers aren't. Slight delay in delivery. Slight as in "the week after next."

Well, we can't wait THAT long to get into our new kitchen, so the fitter's going to come up with some Heath Robinsonesque solution involving screws and masking tape apparently. Lovely.

Kitchen fit: Day 13

Plumbers returned again today. After yesterday's gorgeous tapness, today we were being treated to a radiator.

This radiator, to be precise. We thought it looked good in the brochure but it looks even better on the wall. And what's more, it gets warm. When the heating's on. In't central heating brilliant? (TM)

Meanwhile, back in the rest of the kitchen, there was painting. There will, apparently, be painting again tomorrow too. And with all other significant installations either complete, or not happening until Friday, I might have to find something else to blog about.

Kitchen fit: Day 12 - at last a tap

When you've been filling your kettle, via a large plastic jug, from a wash basin under the stairs no bigger than a loaf of bread, for a month (almost to the day - the last time we had a kitchen sink was way back here), and also using that basin to slop out the coffee maker, and empty the fish tests, and pretty much everything else vaguely sinkish apart from washing up, then this picture is like a vision of heaven.

Yes. We have a tap. Awesome isn't it?

The rest of the day's progress was limited to more painting and, as I may have already mentioned, putting a second coat of cream onto cream-painted units makes little visible impression, there are no "progress" photos to share today. Apart from the awesome tap, of course.

Kitchen fit: Day 11 - the granite men

After the templating activities of ten days ago we had been awaiting the delivery of the granite worktops with eager anticipation. From template to cut normally takes a week. In our case the extra time was down to the complexity of the cuts and the need to radius several of the corners to match the curve of the units.

Today, the wait was over. The granite men arrived just before 10am and within an hour more than half of the worktops were in place.

This is the small worktop to the left of where the hob will be - at the south end of the kitchen on the right. There used to be a tall built-in cupboard here. The finish we've chosen is called "riverwash" - neither the most common highly polished version (fingermark hell) or the slightly less common but still not uncommon matt (greasy fingermark hell), this has an etched surface that is slightly rippled. Still relatively rare (only the second one these particular granite guys had fitted and something the plumber hadn't ever seen). The colour is "absoluto" - the darkest kind of black.

And here's the new sink. There's been a small miscommunication about what's happening under the boiler. Granite men assumed a small box around the pipe work; we wanted a completely flat surface under the cupboard so the boxing in will eventually stretch along most of the wall, meaning the upstand had to be recut and left loose until the box is complete.

They took it all in their stride though.

Beyond ridiculous

Even as I start to write this I can't believe I'm (a) wasting my time with it and (b) sufficiently annoyed with what is essentially a vacuous pile of herd-fodder to bother devoting a post to it, but we just got through watching this year's X Factor "Judges' Houses" round, and I'm dumbfounded at the depths they've plumbed for the inevitable "twist."

I can't remember when it first happened and I certainly can't be bothered to look it up, but by now regular viewers of X Factor are very familiar with the concept of Manufactured Groups at boot camp.

It started one year when the number of groups being put through was pitifully low. Suddenly someone had an "idea." Let's take all these soloists that haven't quite made the grade individually, put them together and pretend they're a group! I swear one year two out of the three groups that made it through to the final rounds hadn't existed at the start of auditions (I *have* checked this, and it was series 4 - 2007 - the culprits being "Hope" and "Futureproof". I'm sure you remember them).

So we've been used to this for at least the past four years and the number of groups going through from initial auditions has continued to be... on the low side. Is anyone surprised? Why would you audition as a group when there's a very public history of the producers making groups up on the spot and giving them - effectively - a free pass to the later rounds at the expense of people who have been singing and practising together for more than a week.

Well you may have thought that was ridiculous, but here's where the title of this post comes from. Because THIS year's shenanigans have taken that level of ridiculousness and multiplied it not once, but twice.

First of all, the groups that were manufactured at boot camp were still not good enough, so right at the end, a few members from a handful of groups were given "a life line." Formed into a new stratum of meta-manufactured group made entirely from left over pieces of worn out manufactured group, these groups were then given tickets to Judges Houses. Or judge's house, in fact, since there's just the one for the groups.

With stupefying surrealism, when THOSE groups weren't good enough either, another random selection of members from two groups were given another "life line" (these really are 'cats' - and they haven't yet run out of lives) and made into a third level of uber-meta-manufactured group who then (surely not?) made it through to the final.

Like I said: beyond ridiculous.

iBeer

Here I am in the living room, with an iBeer, doing an iBlog on my new iPad. Crikey. Saturday nights will never be the same.

(Back on the old - well, new - desktop now). We went out shopping today. Nikki wanted to change our pillows. So... four pillows. That's what we needed. We came back with seven movies, Kasabian's new album (it was playing while we were in HMV and we both quite liked it), a funky clever folding chopping board (Chop2Pot by Joseph Joseph) and a set of ice cube trays, two bags of food from M&S for a "picky tea", a 32GB iPad, an Apple TV box, black leather smartcase, camera connection kit, and... four pillows.

These may well be the most expensive pillows I've ever slept on.

Lovin' the iPad though :o)