Spoons
I know it's unattractive, and ultimately pointless to drone on about declining standards and it's not something I'd usually indulge in but I'm particularly exercised at the moment by spoons.
Not metal spoons, you understand. I've no problem with them. The manly heft of the tablespoon, the witty reflectiveness of the deep bowled soup supper, the cheeky, gamine little teaspoon, I can regard them all with benign equanimity. No, my problem is with the wooden spoon.
As a child, I regarded the spoons wielded by the women of my family with nothing short of awe. They were mighty pieces of treen, ceremonial totems of maternal generosity, vast in size, substantial in capacity and hewn, doubtless, from the same logs as Nelson's ships. They looked like bloody shovels.
They stirred stew, spanked kids, hauled washing out of the boiler and, for all I knew could paddle longships on coastal raids. Each was unique. One bleached by soda from the washing, one indelibly stained with beetroot. One chipped, one scorched but each laden with character.
Now I gaze upon my own spoon pot and find it full of ridiculous little bits of stick. Machine carved out of some pitiful 'sustainable' timber. Short of handle, warped for God's sake, by hot liquids. Unable to stir a thickening stew without snapping at the shaft. Too shallow of bowl to sample soup without pouring it down your arm. Each of them subtly undermining my pleasure in cooking by their weedy, pusillanimity, their manifest un-fitness for purpose.
Why, you ask, do I allow the bastard things in my kitchen if they piss me off so much. You see, I've never bought a wooden spoon in my life. I inherit the things. Some belonged in flats I once occupied, some were left by visiting friends, a set of three came free with a magazine, two were stolen by my ex-wife from her college room-mate.
And there lies the problem - the fundamental thrift of the cook. I can't throw away an adequate spoon: it would be wrong, and yet I couldn't, no matter how badly I'd like to, go into a catering supplier and declare, in a loud, clear voice "I'd like a half dozen of your best wooden spoons, my good man" because I've already got loads at home.
I would have to take my spoons out into the garden, like some ugly and unwanted pet and quietly destroy them and that, I lack the courage to do.
And still they keep coming. Last week my daughter came home from school with a doll she'd made from a wooden spoon. How could she know, as she handed it to me, her eyes alight with pride, what pain she caused her old Dad. I knew that when the inadequately glued wool hair and the cut-out felt dress had fallen off I'd be lumbered, probably for at least a decade, with another crap spoon.
That thing will still be causing me daily pain when she's grown up, left home, met some slack-jawed , leather-jacketed, hoodlum and shacked up in a trailer park. Even then she'll probably be stirring the bastard's microwave curry with a better spoon than mine.
And so I must carry on with my crap spoons. With every act of stirring or sampling another burr under the saddle, I plod on, my culinary life held permanently short of bliss by a few pieces of warped wood and my own thrift and cowardice. The spark of joy when one breaks inevitably extinguished by the arrival of another freebie.
O where are my Granny's great paddles?
Ou sont les cuilleres en bois d'antan?