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Jayne dawson: My kitchen wonderland
I don't know about you but I've got a really boring kitchen, all pressed-sawdust-masquerading-as-wood and a dark tiled floor.
The sawdust doors are a sort of mid-brown colour and the work surface, which is laminate pretending to be granite, is dark grey to match the floor.
If I were to name this kitchen in a brochure I would call it Anonymous, because that is what it is.
I chose it myself, funnily enough, and it was the first kitchen I had ever chosen, having always inherited someone else's kitchen before.
Inheritance has its good and bad points. It's good because living with someone else's kitchen is definitely the cheaper option, plus you have no responsibility for its outdated tastelessness.
The fact that everything is the colour of mud, from the cooker to the wall tiles to the specially-commissioned, mud-brown washing machine, is absolutely no reflection on you.
It's bad because sometimes the choices can be so outlandish as to challenge contemporary thinking on health and safety. I'm remembering the floor covering that was so very, very eye-and-brain confusingly patterned that to put the baby down on it for a second was to risk losing it for some length of time. It could only ever be relocated by sound and feel.
So when I chose My Very First Kitchen the responsibility was huge, because kitchens are important, aren't they? They are the heart of the home, they speak to us of nurturing and love and comfort.
If kitchens were a person they would be a stay-at-home mummy, wouldn't they?
So choosing my first was a huge responsibility, though not as huge as my general naivety about the whole kitchen situation. When they said to me that I shouldn't go for high fashion because it would date, I believed them. Not knowing that a modern kitchen wears out faster than a model can get a dress down the catwalk so style longevity is completely irrelevant.
When they said they would install it for me in a week, I believed them. Not knowing that what they actually meant was it would take them a week to install each item wrongly, a week to wait for the right part to arrive, a week to get them back off the next job and onto ours, a week to wait for the electrician ..I could go on but I'll start to cry again. It turned out to be installed in a week – multiplied by 26. Swear to God. Six months down the line, things were still being put right.
Anyway, so now I have the world's most anonymous kitchen, and it's not a bit heart-of-the-home. I have failed to provide a nurturing, loving environment, in fact it's a bit sterile, plus it's starting to look scruffy, so now I fantasise about a better kitchen though, basically, there's no chance.
Which is a pity because this time, I know. I know the kitchen I want. I want the one I saw in Leeds this week, the one in the Cath Kidston shop.
I've only ever come into contact with her nostalgia-packed products through the safety net of a magazine before, but this week I felt the full impact of the retro kitchen in the flesh, and it was like a flour-covered rolling pin to the solar plexus.
Everything I saw was the opposite of my kitchen: Here were things that were pretty, and painted in old-fashioned shades of pink and blue and green.
True, some of them looked old and battered, just like my kitchen, but in a good way, in a used-and-loved sort of a way, not in a we're-splitting-warping-and-bulging-because-basically-we're-made-of-sawdust sort of a way.
Here was love and perfect family, painted vintage shades of blue. Here were fabrics featuring riots of flowers and made into pinnies that first adorned capacious bosoms back in 1954, when everything in England was Perfectly Pleasant.
Oh all right then, it wasn't perfectly pleasant at all. Rationing was just coming to an end this very month in 1954, nobody had anything, women had few choices in life, work for most men was industrial and back-breaking, and racism, sexism and general ignorance and bigotry were rife. Life was narrower, harder, meaner.
But, gosh, there were some lovely pinnies.
I want this pretend version of old-fashioned life. The one where mum stays at home with the children baking fairy cakes, and loves it. The one where there is home-made meat and potato pie for tea, and dad returns on the train at the same time every evening.
I'll pass on the narrownness, the boringness, the meanness, the tranquillisers to keep the housewives calm, the brutality behind closed doors, but I'll take the old fashioned cake tin, please.
Lots of us want a bit of this pretend nostalgia. I've lost count of the number of young, trendy girls I've seen recently carrying a floral, oil-skin shopping bag. They look like time travellers, clutching evidence of two different worlds.
I understand where they are coming from. In my world I've realised I want those sturdy things, painted things, flowery things. I want to step back in time – but only as far as the pinnie and cake tin and no further. I'll keep the rest of my life as it is, because old-fashioned life, as seen through a light dusting of flour and nostalgia, can look much better than it really was.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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