The Grumpy old woman is still moaning, this time about appliances and electrics!
Why Appliances and Gadgets? Well, we all have at least one appliance in the home. We can all look back fondly (how selective is Memory??) on the oven with the ONE setting, the washing machine with only the MANUAL setting and the special water container (for water to make a cup of tea or Dad's shave) that we used to place upon a heat source until it boiled. I think that was a real kettle. Not an electric kettle, a jug kettle or any other sorta kettle that populates the world at the moment. Ours was called Timothy. OK, you smirk, Timothy was our friend! Timothy boiled gallons of water for us all. Timothy was never responsible for an electrical short. When Timothy passed on, he delighted us by turning into a receptacle for spring bulbs!
So, what we got now? Well. There's the Oven with 32 settings plus the deathly Self Cleaning Setting which delights in Self-Activating whenever we increase the heat for Yorkshire Puddings or a bit of Pork Crackling. Scenes reminiscent of the movie Back Draft are enacted in the kitchen whilst we're trying to make the “shaky gravy”……..adverts have a lot to answer for. And I won't even attempt to plumb the real depths of The Grill! I'm getting too mature to squat on my kitchen floor, peer upwards either through or over my spectacles (depending on which pair I grabbed on the way to the kitchen) in order to see what colour we have on the winding thingy in the roof of the oven. Does putting on the Grill mean we lose the heat from the Oven? Read the multilingual handbook but don't think there'll be an Index with an entry under “Grill”. Ha! Dream on….in any of 18 languages….
Let's look at these Handbooks and the 18 languages with English not in the first six! There is so much to learn about this new oven / washing machine / microwave!
Even a blessed iron is not immune from this multilingual, graduate course! For goodness sake! There's cotton, 'ot!, cool and woolen. These can be permutated with Steam or No
Steam. End of story! D'you know, I now buy two irons at a time cos I know that it will commit Hari-Kari halfway through my fitted sheet on Sunday! Outrageous.
Don't get me wrong I don't want to go back to
the Iron on the Fire days, when a Double Bubble Spit meant it was OK for cotton sheets whilst a One Bubble Spit was just about right for your blouse. I love my iron. I'm passionate about my iron. It's just that it has joined the Monstrous Army of Appliances dedicated to rendering me a technological idiot!
The Washing machine ? Well, all we need is :- Full Tub, Half Tub. Then Dead 'ot, 'ot, Warm, Woolen, Gentle and “just spit on it & rub it with a hanky madam!”
So- answer me this! Promptly please! How come Spanish Microwave Ovens are so much smaller than UK ones? My English plates are too big to fit in. My English casseroles, ditto. Is this the result of an underhand collaboration between Japanese microwave oven makers and the pottery & porcelain industry?
They can't fool me! Things started to go downhill once folks stopped using just the Be-Ro Cookery book…..and Mary Baker was flushed off the shop shelf by these fancy la-di-dah- packets.
