We had a smashing time on Bond St
So does anyone else remember back in the days before there was kerbside recycling and you could go and recycle your glass by throwing it through those holes in the fence on Bond St (was it Bond St?) and you could just stand there and throw bottle after bottle into the pile and listen to it shatter and the noise would release something inside you that you didn’t even know was there?
The boys were outside playing on recycling day this week (last week? Time is fleeting etc.) and I was standing in the window talking to Mum on the phone and watching them both crowd the fence, thrilled to see the ultimate one-two punch of not merely another person but another person who was operating noisy machinery.
I waved at the man, we’re-allin-this-togetherness radiating from me, and then he attached the bin to the hoist and up . . . up
. . . up it went and over and then, oh God, the noise.
The clinking and clanking and shattering and crashing echoed through the car-less street and the airplane-less sky.
It wasn’t the same.
Also, my freezer is full of scary meat.
We are lucky enough to get some cattle beast goodness from time to time from my Dad and as a result I’ve got a great deal of casserole steak and bolar roasts that just lie there miserably as we eagerly mow through the steak and then dutifully plough through the mince.
I have never been a bung-it-inthe-slow-cooker kind of guy, even though I’ve tried.
I feel like slow cookers are the ultimate scam – bleak frantic cookery first thing in the morning and then bleak, unappetizing slush at dinner time plus your house smells like warmed meat.
Plus, I don’t have a spare plug in my kitchen, and using anything to help along the cooking process means I have to unplug the fridge (yes, I am actively shaming Mr Mr here but I have simply run out of grace. I had hoped I’d be a heroine during this whole thing but it turns out I am actually a shrew, a scold and a fishwife, often, thrillingly, all at once).
But I now have room in my schedule for this kind of cooking, in between wandering around and around the house and picking up LEGO of course, and especially as it doesn’t now have to involve me handling flesh at 7am.
And being afraid of unfamiliar cuts of beef seems ridiculous.
And surely making wholesome, stewed meat for my family makes up for the fact that Mummy is a bit of a hot mess and is getting tense about which coffee cup she uses at certain times of the day and may have eaten someone’s forgotten Easter eggs. Right?
So yesterday I seared beef. I picked rosemary.
I chopped celery.
I opened a jar of anchovies that will now lurk, disgusting, at the back of the fridge until the end of time.
I hid mushrooms from the Rabbit. (Him: are they mushrooms in there? Me: Ooh look over there, was that a kereru¯ ? Shall we watch Iron Man 3 and have a biscuit?)
I dragged out my cast-iron casserole thing and set the oven low. Then I savoured the prechildren thrill of uncapping a bottle of wine at 1pm and sloshed it in the screaming-hot pan to deglaze.
Then I marvelled at the explosion of beef fat and red wine up the walls, all over the roof, all over the windows that I had shamed Mr Mr into cleaning just a week ago, and all over the floor.
And then – then! – there was a secondary explosion that splattered the back of my neck, although luckily it arced so high into the air that it was merely uncomfortably warm by the time it cascaded down onto my skin and hair.
I miss the Bond St glass smashing. I really do.