I must confess that I read with trembling hand and twitching eyelid that story in Two AM (10/2/ 84) about the TV show that turned down an offer of dishwashers as prizes because they were too sexist.
This raises questions about the whole sexist apparatus of the kitchen and the role-reversal situation in which I have lately found myself.
The odd theory that men get in the way in the kitchen has long since gone down the sink.
Take it from me, we proud victims of domesticity are alive and muddling.
I have learnt all the positions of the various kitchen machinery.
I can give you an intimate layout of the knife and fork drawer, ticking off the various items with what fingers I have left.
I know where the best large china plate is kept, way at the back of all the other china and you have to lay the whole damn lot on the floor while you’re groping around for the accursed
piece. Talk about crackpots!
Getting back to the knife drawer, we have carving knives that wouldn’t carve butter and others that would sheer through armour plate. In another age they would have been cutlassing the heads off buccaneers or dropping from a great height on the necks of the French aristocracy.
Take the saucepan cupboard. I’ve opened the door and been overwhelmed by an avalanche of utensils, falling around me in an uproar of aluminium.
There are old saucepans that may be used for boiling eggs and we get along tolerably well.
But new saucepans with thickened sides are teasy and temperamental and the kitchen mechanic can get into a nasty mess with them.
Then there are the machines that beat things and how you manipulate them beats me. They have instructions attached giving speeds for certain substances but they could disintegrate me in a twinkling of an eye and, man, that’s no mean disintegration.
You need only take one look at me with my wild stare and lips foaming with egg-nog spray and brutalised banana to know that I’ve been on one hell of a blender.
So the kitchen has taken hold of me. I have become its creature, made captive by its pitiless machines in the dreaded cycle of meal preparation.
Sooner or later one of them is going to get me and I’ll be served up to the wife’s friends with a bit of parsley. Serve them right. I’ve never gone down well with them.
Of course I know the dishwashing machine is a marvellous device and you stack the dishes and set the dials and close the door.
For silly sexists such as me it’s more wonderful than space walking.
But, I ask myself, does the machine also scrape the dishes?
Why won’t the lazy devils in our dining-room finish their meals properly instead of leaving little plateside deposits of carrot or potato or the bit of gristle that stuck in their whistle?
While I don’t actually lick the plates I do take a peck at this and that. Yet when I shove dishes into the sink, bits of spaghetti come writhing to the surface, while rounds of carrots swirl like lifebuoys after the sinking of the Titanic.
The role-reversal kitchen also has other horrors for the beginner such as the condiments closet where there are a dozen salt shakers, four of them blocked, six of them empty and two working through only two holes.
I could also mention the shelf of opened jam, that sticky avenue of irritable old pots waving sad banners of brown paper tops with marmalade congealing beneath and clinging crab apple jelly which I’ve found very useful for sticking down tiles.
So it’s easy for a man to have a breakdown in the kitchen. The only secure and reassuring routine is the washing-up.
One’s at home squirting the soap, fishing in the sink and trying to crowd things on the old plastic drying rack
So the dishwasher would be wonderful. Let it saturate my insecurity. I may even fondle it a little and kiss it when no-one is looking. It can be as sexist as it likes with me. I am ready to befriend it for life.
My wife says it would be just like me to get one now that I’m doing a kitchen stint.
So I’m biding my time. I’ve learnt how to get the flour from the flour tin and spill only half of it; I know how to find aged turnips at the bottom of the vegetable rack. And there’s so much more.
But just a word of warning. Don’t push me too far.
Otherwise I’ll dishwasher my role-reversal hands of the whole thing.
Max Fatchen