Do U tensil?

In October I spent almost a week at my parents’ house helping my mum to declutter. My mum is resolutely strong and fit (my dad a bit less so), but she’s also resolute in a promise she made when she was my age: that her children wouldn’t be torn apart by fighting over her stuff. Hence she’s trying to shuck off as many possessions as she can bear to while we can enjoy looking at them together and hearing the stories they prompt. Let me tell you, the stories are legion. Every precious item, whether heirloom, gift or household good has a provenance, a tale, a mythology. One of the best tales is attached to “The Swan’s Down Cushion” but it’s not my story to tell here. (If you know me in real life I will tell you, but it involves a CRIME so I mustn’t spill it publicly!) In a world where second hand things simply don’t have value any more, where everyone is overwhelmed by a rising tide of hoarded household goods, the only way you can get rid of these treasures is to carefully unstitch the articles from their stories, and try to move the stuff on. It’s hard. You take them to charity shops whose volunteers peer out from great heaps of other people’s “too good to throw” and baulk at gems like the coat “I had made by Natalya out of tweed my father bought in 1937,” the books that are “my sister Mag’s collection of CP Snow,” (which you have to say with Mag’s lisp, “Theepee Thnow”) - or to the tip, like the five million unframed photos of a long-dead spaniel, “well, you kids had been to stay and we needed to finish the film”. It was an emotional few days, not least because we weren’t ever going to deal with everything, and we knew it. Mum would wave her hands over a rammed bookshelf, her wardrobe, a pile of photos and say, “You can deal with that when the time comes…”. The time. The time will come. We don’t know what it will look like, we don’t know when, but it will come. And when the time comes, going through things and looking at them is an important part of processing whatever happens at the time. How glorious, though, to go through a chunk of that process while the stories can still be accessed from the horse’s mouth. Oh that’s another good one - but no time! Sometimes the best stories are attached to the least glamorous of objects. In the bottom of my mum’s teatowel drawer, we found an unused Irish linen dish cloth from her trousseau (the purchase of which, in 1968, is an AMAZING story by the way, involving two dozen udder cloths. Two dozen udder cloths!). It’s a true treasure, both as a story and an object. Don’t worry, I took it home. If nothing else, because a weakness for textiles is a dominant gene in my female lineage. At the kitchen table, making mash with my mother’s peeler, using her chopping boards, her potato masher, I’m struck that many of these things are the Utensils of my Childhood. Even if my mum doesn’t have stories, I do. I know things about these utensils. “This is the bowl from my mother’s Kenwood Mixer, long gone. It’s time came after 20 years or so of making our birthday cakes and after many repairs. The bowl stays because it’s an unbeatable bowl for making meringues*.” (*Yes, I DO see what I did there - unbeatable… meringues - and wasn’t it terribly clever, actually?) Many are not the Utensils of my Childhood. She bought a new set in her fifties - claiming that lots of the Us of my C had fallen apart and weren’t useful any more, but I experienced something close to grief to know that she’d replaced the potato masher. You see, I also have a weakness for a good utensil. Years ago, I started a Facebook group for people who want to share pictures of ergonomically satisfying fish slices, camp pepper grinders and beautiful spatulae, When I set out on my grown up life, I believed that true adulthood would be achieved when my utensil drawer contained only well-made tools: an ice cream scoop with a certain heft to it, tongs that enhance my dexterity, a slotted spoon with authority. Every kitchen tool would have the same perfect balance of form and function that my tiny red colander has. Let’s take a moment to admire my tiny red colander. Mmm… isn’t she gorgeous. You should feel her in the hand! She is among a handful of items I own that are grown up enough to satisfy these criteria. The rest are interim utensils, the ones I’ve been waiting to upgrade. This Christmas, I realised that I’m never going upgrade them. That kind of adulthood remains a distant peak, shrouded in mist. The thing is, my own children are entering their grown up phase. For the first time, this year, they came home for Christmas from where they are living away.. It hit me that my interim utensils are here to stay. The crappy plastic ice cream scoop I threw into the trolley at Tesco one day in about 2010 has become the Scoop of Their Childhood. The palette knife that I found in a drawer in a flat I lived in in Streatham, discarded by the previous owner because it was old and useless, has smoothed the icing on hundreds of birthday and Christmas cakes over the last 30 years. It has developed its own patina of story. Unless they spectacularly collapse, I wouldn’t dare replace these utensils with things that are perhaps better designed but less storied. I want my kids to feel that sense of home in our spatulae and bread knife and peeler as well as the building. I’m forced to declare my utensil selection complete in its mish-mash state. Potato mish-masher? If my children are adults, then god, maybe I am too. And I suppose I’m a mish-mash too. Bits of me are like the colander: functional and beautiful. Bits of me are like this weird garlic peeling plate I got for Christmas once: pretty but I’m not sure whether it really earns its place in the drawer. Bits of me are like the palate knife: actually very much fit for purpose, even if I would have never have chosen them. There are bits of me that are like the plastic ice cream scoop. I thought I’d be able to upgrade them, but I have to live with them as they are. Things are never just things, are they? UPCOMING SHOWS! I’m writing a new show. It might be ridiculous. It’s called Octopus and SO FAR it is booked into the following places: Bristol Comedy Festival JANUARY 28TH Leicester Comedy Festival FEBRUARY 14TH Glasgow International Comedy Festival MARCH 18TH But please look out for it at a festival near you because I’ve got applications in for a bunch of them. This is a public episode. 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