Читать книгу The Yummy Mummy’s Family Handbook - Liz Fraser - Страница 48

As we all know, kitchens can be troublesome places, and there are two main reasons for this crossfire: firstly because, despite it being what you consider as your own space, because you work there more than anyone else, it is necessarily a shared space for the entire family to use and make a mess of. This is akin to allowing babies, toddlers, moody teenagers and pre-menstrual mothers to all hang out in somebody’s office just because it happens to have biscuits in it. It’s a recipe for disaster, and someone will probably lose a limb before the day is out.

The second reason for the somewhat volatile nature of the kitchen is because most of what happens in there centres around food—who buys it, prepares it, cooks it, eats it and clears up after it. Whatever your own relationship with food, there is little doubt that it is the source of an enormous amount of stress, and we’ll come to this confusing subject in a little while.

For now, we are dealing with the problem of intrusion. You want the kitchen organised and maintained just so, because you are in there three hours a day and feel it should be your own space with everything where you want it to be: condiments above the toaster, tea and coffee near the kettle, utensils near the sink and pots stacked in the big cupboard in the corner. Perfect. Everything is going well, until He decides to help, by moving the condiments next to the oven, the utensils to a new drawer next to the fridge, and hanging the pots from a special rack thing. Aaargh! Now you can’t find anything, the Marmite has melted and you have banged your head five times on a large frying pan dangling above the sink. Cheers, mate.

The most distressing thing about this kind of Kitchen Conflict is that it leads to the most petty and unwinnable arguments, where each of you knows you are partly right and partly being an arse. You can’t exactly turn around and say, ‘Look, will you just fuck off and leave my kitchen alone—it was just fine before and now you’ve messed it all up’, firstly because he was only trying to help, and secondly because by saying ‘my kitchen’ you commit yourself to being perfectly happy to cook and wash-up for the rest of your lives together. Oh dear.

Similarly he can’t turn to you and say, ‘Jesus, I was just trying to help—I can’t do anything right, can I? Fine—have it all your way but don’t expect me to do anything in here again’, firstly because he knows he will sound like a moody seven-year-old, which is not a turn-on for most women, and secondly because he will absolve all his power in the kitchen forever, thus rendering his late-night bacon sarnies and beer shelf in the fridge Out of Bounds.

Throw children into the mix, with their woefully bad sandwichmaking technique, inability to drink from a cup without pouring half of it onto the table and penchant for leaving the cheese unwrapped so that it dries into a brick within hours, and you have a kitchen that no longer bears any resemblance to the one you so carefully planned and maintained before everyone else trashed it.

So how can a group of people come to share such a communal space harmoniously? Well, it’s certainly a tall order, which even Jamie Oliver would struggle with, but let’s have a go:

Don’t beat about the Aga. Make sure everyone knows how you feel about the kitchen (whether that means you like it, hate it, begrudge it or relish it in there) and ask them to appreciate this. Assuming it’s your domain, or treating it as their own playground, will both lead to rows and smashed plates.

Share the load. Make it understood that the kitchen is a shared space, which means everyone has to chip in and keep it tidy and useable. It’s not ‘Mummy’s job’ to put the dishes away and scrub the dried grease off the roasting tin. Mummy has cooked it, so you help to clean up afterwards, mate.

Open your eyes and ears. As much as we hate to admit it, just occasionally somebody clever will come along and suggest a much better way of doing something, which we thought we were already doing just perfectly, thank you. When it’s something kitchen-related it’s twice as hard to swallow the large, dry lump of pride blocking your oesophagus, because—if you spend more time in the kitchen than the person making the helpful suggestion does—it means they have just scored a point in your territory. It’s as though you, having only popped into his place of work once or twice because he left his glasses at home or forgot to wear any shoes, coolly suggested a far simpler and more efficient way for him to do whatever it is he does there for hours on a daily basis. Cheeky minx. Try to listen to any suggestions, and be happy to learn from a fresh pair of eyes. You can always lie and say you were just about to do that, as it happens.