7965/20906
How quickly they forget. I was in Holland and Barratt buying some nuts and the young woman behind the counter asked if I had a loyalty card. I did, but didn't have it with me, so she asked me for my post code. The card is, of course registered to my old house, the house I was living in two days ago. I got the postcode wrong (mixing up the postcodes of my last two houses) and I COULDN'T REMEMBER THE CORRECT POST CODE. The one from two days ago. That's some brutal moving on, right there.
The last seven years never happened. Bad news for my son who is seven on Saturday,
I worked hard on the kitchen today (as did Catie and Phoebe, but I put in an early and a late shift) and by the end of the day it was almost finished. We had Ernie back with us by night time and were able to eat around the kitchen table. Ernie too, has settled in fast. His bedroom is down an L shaped corridor from our room (he was next door before) and Catie did some prep runs for him in case he got scared in the night. Phoebe helpfully jumped out at him saying she was going to kill him during these. Not very helpful but I laughed out loud when I was told about this.
We went back to the old house to tidy up a bit and retrieve more booty. We still haven't sold it and no one has even been round to look at it for months (it was off the market for a while), but I'd noticed that the cat had been sick under one of the guest room beds at some point in the last seven years, but the sick was only now visible that the bed was gone. So we thought we should clear that up, remembering how off-putting it had been to see a lump of human shit on a toilet seat in one of the houses we looked at. It's important not to put off prospective buyers with bodily waste.
It was very much a lite move that we did on Friday. There is so much more to either bring or dispose of, but we made two trips (the second time with both cars so that we could pick up Ernie after) and got a fair amount out of the sinking ship.
At home we decided that it might be best to dump the contents of some of the jars of sugar and flour that we were pretty sure had sat on our shelves in the previous kitchen for seven years largely untroubled. Stuff like gluten free self-raising flour and various dark sugars and unusual spices. I put them all together in a bin bag and considered that no one had ever mixed such a strange combination of ingredients in these exact quantities and wondered if I might accidentally create a cure for cancer or something that would give anyone who ate it super powers. I'd never be able to recreate it if so, so I hoped it would just be a benign collection of out of date mainly powdered food stuffs.
Catie and me disagree quite strongly about self-by dates - she thinks that food will go off at one second after midnight the day after the packet recommends and I strongly feel that you can eat anything that doesn't have mould or maggots in it. Sure, occasionally I am violently ill as a result, but no food is wasted. Unless you count regurgitated food. But I let her win this round and we will start anew and probably never buy any more coconut sugar or 10 packets of long grain rice in one go, when we eat rice about once a month at most (I am not sure that was even a Covid thing as it went out of date in 2021).
There were spices in the spice draw that I probably bought when I lived in Balham (left there in 2003) and I wouldn't be surprised if something had survived from the stuff my mum gave me when I left home in 1986. I certainly recognise a few kitchen implements that have been with me that long, including a cheese grater that is probably 50 years old, but still grates fine and (as James Acaster has pointed out) the other three sides are pretty much pristine and unused). Certainly the plate that I liberated from University with my college crest on it was purloined in 1986 and was probably pretty old then as it had been relegated to a shared kitchen.
What I am saying is it's weird to touch every single thing that you have in your kitchen in one weekend. And realise that for many things it's the first time you've touched them since you've bought them. I rarely if ever have poached eggs at home, but for some reason had at least five devices designed to give you the perfect poached egg that I HAVE NEVER TRIED OUT! Well I did have. Now they're in a box to go to charity for someone else to buy, put in a drawer and NEVER USE.
Those egg poachers will probably survive way longer than anyone who is alive today and yet never fulfil their purpose of poaching an egg. I don't know whether to feel sad for them or happy. Is that a life well lived or a waste of existence or should I stop giving inanimate objects the power of thought and emotion.
Great news for the RHLSTP on October 7th, joining the take-no-shit Doon Mackichan is the awesome Fern Brady. This will be an incredible night and I suspect stuff will be said that won't make it to the podcast. Come and see it live if you can!
Tickets here. 
