An ode to my kitchen.

My favourite room has always been the kitchen, it’s not only the place where you always meet a member of your family and one or two of the cats, always starved to death, of course, but most importantly it’s the place where all the good things are, except for the wine, the wine’s in the wine cellar, but still, there’s the coffee machine and the espresso machine, there’s the toaster and the bread, the marmalade, the cookies, the chocolate, the honey, the apples and bananas, strawberries and artichokes, organic and terrific, the olives, black and green, the pasta, the spices, cinnamon and chillies, basil, rosemary, and paprika, there’s the tea canisters you’ve imported from Paris, all those fancy Mariage Frères and Kusmi boxes, then there’s the fridge, of course, filled with salami and cheese, buffalo mozzarella and Crottin de Chavignol, yoghurt and lemonade, the milk for the coffee and the tea, milk in first, by the way, always, there’s your china, the Spode and the Royal Copenhagen, the inherited cutlery with some dead guy’s initials on them, the oven, the oven that I shamefully haven’t mentioned before, the oven to make some yummy cake in, or a soufflé, or whatever, the hissing sound of lit gas alone is heavenly, it tells you stories of great menus in the offing, or the roistering one when the water for your tea comes to a boil, the minutes you wait for the brew, five minutes to do nothing at all, just counting down the seconds while looking out of the window and listen to some blackbird’s ramblings on… oh, that place we call the kitchen, it would be the same by any other name, of course, but why not call it heaven?

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