The Aga Saga

Not having a kitchen is starting to take its toll. Takeaways on our knees surrounded by dust is just depressing and the trips to the pub for club sandwiches are getting expensive, not to mention wildly unhealthy. I haven’t prepared so much as a bowl of cereal in over a month and I’ve taken to buying a 50p chocolate croissant from Tesco Local on my way to work each morning. Jax and I discuss the situation on the mattress one night. We agree that we’re both looking a bit rounder than usual, and that being single and fat is a definite no-go. So we have now put ourselves on a strict sushi and smoothie eating plan. I think Jax spearheaded this campaign because she’s got a bit of a crush on a tall and lean Arty Alpha who she works with at the ad agency (she goes for the skinny ones, I go for the big ones; I couldn’t bear the thought of a boyfriend fitting into my jeans). She’s entirely oblivious to the crush of course, but he appears in every other sentence at the moment, and apparently he’s just so funny, and so talented and I’ll never guess what he did in the office yesterday... I give her a knowing smile and then she denies the whole thing in an outraged and disgusted fashion. She’ll keep this up for another couple of weeks, and then we’ll move into the sending-random-amusing-but-clever-texts-quite-late-at-night phase I should imagine.

Anyway, the kitchen. It is being hand made by Peter the Carpenter in Suffolk and seems to be taking around the same length of time as the Sistene Chapel. He rang Jax and promised her for the fifteenth time that he would come soon and fit the thing. Jax, at the end of her tether, with nowhere left to negotiate (she paid him in full upfront, but we don’t talk about that…) said she expected to see him on the 12th of Never. Peter the Carpenter found that highly amusing and said he loved a girl with a sense of humour. I took the phone from her and hung up as I sensed she was about to use the ‘C’ word.

Bob the Builder, however, has been right on schedule, and won’t stop for anyone. He came round this morning as planned to hook up the beautiful, proud and haughty Aga, which was meant to be the centrepiece of the room, for baking scones, warming hands and creating the ‘cottage’ part of our Urban Cottage theme. But hooking up the Aga will now never, ever happen. Because the Aga runs off of gas and electricity, and when we bought it we thought it just ran off gas. We told Bob it was just gas. So Bob dutifully hooked up a gas pipe, hid it behind the plastering and under the reclaimed floorboards from the Cambridge college and left just one discreet nozzle poking out in the designated place in the kitchen area. To fit an electricity pipe now, this far down the line, would require many hours and much expense in ripping out all of the tiles, two kitchen cabinets and half of the floorboards. We don’t have any extra hours and we certainly don’t have any extra money. The Aga was purchased many months ago, stored at Jax’s ex-future-in-laws for an embarrassingly gratuitous eight months, during the break-up and beyond, and was carried up three flights of stairs by six men a few weeks ago. It has been a complete pain in the backside and now it won’t even work. It’s a vicious, superior and withering piece of kit and we now want it out of the flat as soon as humanly possible.

It doesn’t care, it’s just sitting there, laughing at us, as if it always knew it would never lower itself to the function of actually being cooked on. If this Aga were a person it would be Keira Knightley; beautiful, irritating, pouting across the room with no intention of ever mucking in. Bob tried to break the news gently. Jax made to throw herself out of the window but he managed to catch her in time. I was inclined to let her go, to cleanse her soul of the unending frustration and heartache that this flat is causing. One final jump from the third floor, onto the hard concrete below, to succumb to the will of the Refurbishment, to accept that the house always wins. I asked Bob if we couldn’t just use the gas part, and ignore the electric hot-plate section in question. Perhaps we could use it to store clothes, I suggested. When he had finished laughing he departed to the corner shop to buy a Twix and give us a moment to reflect.

Tonight we boycotted the sushi and smoothie and sloped off to the pub for yet another club sandwich and chips and a bottle of wine. At about half past nine Jax’s phone beeped. It was a random amusing and clever text from the Arty Alpha. An interesting turn of events. Jax grinned and pushed the bowl of chips over to my side of the table.

When we came home, Keira was smirking at us, one eyebrow raised in mocking derision, so we kicked her. We felt better. Then we took her picture and put her on Ebay. We’re hoping that she ends up with a domestic slattern who fries cheap, greasy potato waffles all over her expensive body and never wipes her down.