Maureen Lipman gets a great line in Daytona. 'Are you the angel of death?' she asks her unexpected visitor. Today I seem to be the angel of death when it comes to domestic appliances. The Systems Administrator had disappeared to the Oval, and I decided it was time to start cleaning the house, which has got to a state of fluffiness and dustiness that even I find unacceptable. In a normal British summer this fits into the odd wet day, but as 2013 has been short of those, and I spent the last one (yesterday) engaged in charitable labours, I thought I'd just have to sacrifice a dry one.
I managed to sabotage the kitchen radio almost immediately. It is an early DAB digital radio with a sticky on-off switch which is intensely annoying, but used to work if you tried enough times. I picked the radio up to wipe the kitchen work top and put it down again, quite gently, about six inches from where it was previously. It stopped working. I fiddled with the button, which no longer clicked, and I thought irritably that the wretched thing had finally died, and that it was a pity it had done that after I spent ten minutes wiping the sticky smears off it.
It is a fact that anything in a working kitchen will very slowly collect a thin layer of grease. Or at least, if all you do in the kitchen is boil eggs and make toast, I suppose it won't, but if you ever do anything involving frying, or roasting meat, tiny particles of fat will make their way into the air and land on every surface in the kitchen. You don't have to be deep frying, even browning onions for a stew, or cooking a healthy, vegetable based stir fry will do it. I am baffled by the lifestyle articles in the Sunday magazines showing kitchens with chandeliers in them. The owners either have servants to clean their elegant and wildly inappropriate light fittings, one glass drop at a time, or else never cook.
By lunchtime I was getting bored of cleaning, and thought I'd go to the bank at Brightlingsea to pay in the beekeepers' money. I was congratulating myself that I didn't go yesterday, since last night I was handed the tea money, the raffle money, and the surplus from the summer barbecue to bank as well, so I'd only have had to go again. Traffic was moving unexpectedly slowly on the stretch of road running down to the railway crossing, and I could see cars ahead of me turning round and giving up. I thought there was maybe some problem with the crossing, and followed suit as I was opposite a handy gate, intending to go the other (longer) was round the block. I reached another solid line of virtually stationary traffic at Arlesford, and decided to turn round again while I had the opportunity and go home. Thirty one minutes after setting out, I arrived back, money still un-banked. I had a look at the local paper on-line and discovered that there had been a five car accident at Thorrington, one person airlifted to hospital. Poor them. And annoying for everyone else stuck in the jam, and me with half an hour of my life spent driving around pointlessly.
After lunch I returned to the cleaning, and picked vast amounts of cat hair off the door mats in the hall with my fingers, then quite a lot more fur with the aid of the vacuum cleaner. I kept an eye on it, just in case, but the red light to warn it was full or blocked never came on. Then it stopped, abruptly. I tried plugging it into a different socket, but got the same result, one vacuum cleaner apparently well and truly visited by the angel of death. Unless the SA can fix it we need another, and quickly.
I was going to go and take the supers off the beehive, which was one reason I needed a scrupulously fur free kitchen, but after an invasion by seven wasps I began to think I had better leave it until after my working weekend, when I would be around to see the job through. If any of the honey has set in the comb then I'll have to melt it out instead of spinning it in the centrifuge, and it seemed unfair to leave the SA with a giant wasp bait in the kitchen for three days. Plus last time I kept the kitchen door shut and the window closed almost constantly for twenty-four hours, the fridge-freezer almost broke down from the strain as the heat built up, and given I had already sabotaged the radio and the vacuum cleaner I didn't want to be responsible for breaking them as well.
I had a final happy thought about the radio, after I'd written a note for the SA explaining that it had given up the ghost (this does not presage a breakdown in communications, simply that I'll have probably gone to bed before the SA gets back, and will definitely have gone to work before the SA surfaces in the morning). I checked whether the power lead jack had slipped partially out of its socket in the back of the radio when I lifted it up, and it had. I pressed it home and lo, like Lazarus arising from the dead to amaze you all, it worked again. I beamed at the shiny volume knob I'd polished so painstakingly, and tore off the part of my note to the SA dealing with the death of the radio. It was embarrassing enough last time, when I couldn't get the printer to work, and the SA had to ask me very kindly if I'd actually remembered to plug my laptop into the printer, as well as plugging the printer in to the mains socket.
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