The kitchen has had a ‘resurgence’ since my youth. Once the domain of mother, no one dare set foot inside its laminate confines with mustard yellow colour schemes. Want a snack or cash and carry juice? Mum will make it. Cup of tea? On tap. Even with the advent of the microwave, it was Mater’s palace and none of us chaps even knew where the new-fangled devices were, let alone how to use them.

But now the kitchen is the hub of the homestead: The meeting place of the house where ever more exotic culinary legends of our youth, such as pot noodles and tinned potatoes, have been invaded by a language of their own, including the irksome self-descriptor of ‘foodies’. Everything has become clinical from the ‘preparation area’ to ‘cold storage’ and devices become more alien. Only recently I was fuming after buying some coffee beans instead of powder, and, realising I was stumped, I Google searched for ‘grinder’ (the results of which were not what I expected…).

The fridge used to attempt, lamely, to be the centrepiece of the house. On foreign jaunts abroad, in the day when such activity was rare, present buying was a cinch. On day one I would buy my grandmother a fridge magnet. Not only were they cheap and advertise places she had never been, or would go to, but they were light enough to not rip the baggage allowance to shreds. The magnets held a dual purpose by holding up some ‘important’ letter usually to do with an upcoming parent evening which you’d forget about anyhow, despite the information slapping you around the chops each time you delved into the confines for a dash of full fat.

And with the new devices, designed to make things simpler, we again over engineer everything to make them more difficult. As a family of laggards, take the dishwasher for example. We have only taken the plunge in the last five years preferring to go ‘old school’ prior to that by using a sink and Fairy Liquid. Yet, from my limited experience, the dishwasher takes more time than going manual. Each time I load it, my wife unloads, as I have not loaded her correctly, apparently. Not only that, but I am forbidden from placing dirty food receptacles into the machine, as she rinses them prior to entry, thus defeating the expenditure on said item anyhow.

In addition to mechanisation of our kitchens, all manner of contraptions have come to bear. On a visit to family some years ago, I asked the pre-requisite ‘do you need a hand?’, out of courtesy, not expecting, for a nanosecond that someone would take me up on my tokenistic offer.

To my surprise the response was in the affirmative and I was asked a question that still haunts me to this day: ‘Can you toss the salad?’. Completely nonplussed, it could have gone very wrong, so I admitted my lack of education and was presented with a ‘salad spinner’ and schooled as to its usage. Who on God’s earth would ever think that that device solves a problem? For the uninitiated, you put your wet salad in, and then spin it to ‘shake off excess water’. My disdainful comments as to the pointlessness of this contraption fell on deaf ears, but suffice to say we were never invited back.

And on it goes: I have just checked through a cupboard in our kitchen. There are coffee machines I didn’t even know we had, an ice maker, a frosty machine (not a clue) as well as grills, griddles, sandwich toasters and some plastic and wood pronged contraption that would not look out of place in Ann Summers.

But, despite my disdain for the kitchen, when alone, it is a calming environment where the limits of my skills are put to the test through the kettle and the kettle alone. When invited to house parties now, a rarer occurrence by the year it seems, you will, as Jona Lewie predicted ‘always find me in the kitchen at parties’, as it is my safe space as long as you don’t try and convince me to go in for more salad spinning or dishwasher loading…

  • Brett Ellis is a teacher