Category: The Guy With The Hand

Reflections on living with a ninty-year-old, cooking in an old-fashioned way, memories from a long life, and what it means to be sinister.

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At Home With The Guy With The Hand

The Accidental Aga Man

An Aga which dates back to the ark is the culinary equivalent of the Morris Minor to modern motoring; there is a sentimental overestimation of its capacities. Don’t get me wrong, the Morris Minor was a great car, for its time. However, it was also slow, clunky, and unresponsive. The Aga, back then, was a bit the same. Especially my mother’s, which landed in her kitchen when the venerable Morris was still in production.

Before the romance of the thing gets to you, remember that my mother’s heavyweight-of-the-kitchen comes with a mercury thermometer (a device so vague as to be practically useless.) Its modern successor comes with an electronic control panel. You have precious little control over the older cooker. Therefore, even if the bar of mercury indicates a nice, hot oven, right now, there is no telling when the silver strip will shrink to almost nothing. In ten minutes, the Aga can turn from a heat-hero, to an arctic-anarchist who intends to ruin your best laid dinner plans. I swear the thing has as many mood swings as a vegan teenager contemplating food labels in the deep freeze aisles of your local supermarket. You must be ever vigilant when cooking. And always bear in mind that the cooker becomes horribly offended when faced with cold-bottomed saucepans. It will take revenge on you should you forget this and be so rude as to place the largest, coldest saucepan from your collection onto its hot plate.  

There was a time when I could handle such temperamental tantrums, but the years passed, I moved onto electric cookers; ones with fan ovens, bright lights, and electric thermostats. I spent forty years forgetting about my mother’s Aga, then covid struck and I found myself in lockdown with my ninety-year-old mother and her sturdy, old range. I must admit that we struggled in the beginning. All three of us had to become reacquainted with each other’s idiosyncrasies. It was a steep learning curve – rediscovering my aged-relative’s lifestyle, becoming used to my childhood kitchen once more, and coming to terms with its neolithic cooker. On a difficulty scale, we might be talking about climbing the north face of the Matterhorn.

Our biggest problem at the beginning was our daily bread. Remember the great, covid, bread shortage of 2020? It will, no doubt, go down in the annals as one of the most unnecessary panic buyouts of all times. It was right up there with the great toilet paper run of the same epoch. Panic, isolation, and being grounded led many people to YouTube for salvation. Never were the words ‘how to…’ typed by so many in a mad bid to save their sanity.  It didn’t matter which ‘how to…,’ you found salvation in, what dark secret your ‘how to…,’ explored. ‘How to…,’ offered a lifebuoy to keep you afloat in the Covid Sea of Terror in which many people found themselves drowning.

After learning everything you needed to know about applying nail polish, or playing the ukulele, I’m willing to bet that everybody looked up ‘sour dough’ on the internet; if only to understand what all the fuss was about. I resisted, the Aga was presenting enough challenges for me on the Soda Bread front, without having ferments living in my fridge, getting up to God knows what when the light went out, planning, no doubt, some kind of explosive escape.

When flour eventually returned to supermarket shelves, I decided it was time to develop a working relationship with the Aga. It was time to bake. Brown bread is easy to make under normal circumstances. These were anything but usual. Mercury thermometers came into the baking equation in a way they never had before. After slopping all the ingredients together – brown bread is easy to make – the problems began.

Any printed markings the thermometer once had, disappeared years ago. A few etched lines remained, a kind of treasure map that might help you to gauge the range’s mood, if properly understood. The line somewhere-in-the-middle became a beacon for the baker staring hopelessly at the mute cooker. A second line, somewhere-below-somewhere-in-the-middle, became another beacon to help triangulate the Aga’s warmth on a given day. The former, I learned after a couple of weeks experimentation, gave me a 40-to-50-minute baking time, and the latter resulted in a baked cake after 50 to 60 minutes. Anybody who needs the security of accurate instructions must know this, vagueness is all the rage in the world of ancient ranges.

However, huge reserves of patience, and much experimentation, yielded amazing results. These, almost outweighed the traumas endured becoming reacquainted with the Aga. The food that came from its oven reminded me of cookbooks from the nineteen fifties. The food looked more real somehow and tasted even better.

But such a prima donna is difficult to live with. The words mercury and cooking do not sit comfortably in the same sentence. Manic temperature swings are not for everybody. Remember too that the carbon footprint of this old oil-burner best not be mentioned in polite society. However, rather like the Mini of old, the Aga has an updated sister. Mercury has been removed from the cooking equation. Proper temperature controls have been put in place. The looks remain the same, but the bragging rights have been enhanced. Convincing my mother that these upgrades are worth considering might prove difficult, but I’m thinking about it. 

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At Home With The Writer's Desk

A Desk With A View

My previous desk was a cluttered space, invariably littered with note-covered envelopes, dusty bric-a-brac, and mismatched office equipment. It was a proper writer’s desk. The only thing of elegance being the vintage, Anglepoise lamp which sat, camouflaged, beneath scrawl-covered post-it-pads. The table was exactly the correct height for me, and the chair was just so. Comfort is what I’m talking about. This was my private space; where I could write, think, or sleep, depending on my mood.

Sadly, that desk was in Sandyford, while I was trapped in Portlaoise for the first Covid Lockdown. As a result, it became my first covid casualty, sanity my second. Everybody knows that we writers have needs; enough of us have told you so. And at the top of that pyramid, our uppermost requirement, is a space of our own. A sacred place, shared only with our muse or, more often, nagging, writerly doubts.

Some scribes like to work in a shed, some need a library, for the more outgoing, a coffee table at a local café is a prerequisite. All of us have a place where we write, even if it is only a tray, laden down with pens paper and note pads. During that first, eerie lockdown the tiny box room in my mother’s home became my new creative hub.

Boxrooms come with serious limitations, size being the obvious one. In my case there was also the view; not mine, but that of the bored soldiers on sentry duty in Portlaoise prison. My window was in their direct line of vision. This increased everyone’s discomfort. They stared at me while I stared at their concrete watchtower and pondered my next sentence. In moments of distraction, it occurred to me that they probably would have liked something younger and female to watch over. As for me, I wanted something more pastoral by way of distraction. Barring that, my old view of an industrial estate carpark would have been a perfect substitute. It would certainly have been prettier than the watchtower; and a lot of life floats past one’s eyes in a carpark.

Building an extension was out of the question, there would, no doubt, have been objections from my patient mother, not to mention her old-fashioned neighbours and the rule-bound county council.

A comfortable garden shed like the one George Bernard Shaw had – one that could be turned to face the sun as it moved across the heavens – was also out of the question. The builders were in lockdown after all. So, in a fit of desperation, I reached into the closet for a solution to my problem. While many people are anxious to come out of their closets, I had to work very hard to get into mine.

Closets by their nature are dark, musty places which no one enters, except in the worst sort of horror stories. This gloomy, boxroom, hell hole took the horror film cliché very much to heart; with its uninviting interior, its abundance of cobwebs and its collection of damp, dusty, discarded books. Judging by the smell of the place, dust mite orgies were a 24/7 event. If you suffered from allergies, simply opening the closet doors would have landed you in a noisy, overcrowded A&E with respiratory failure. To think that this space was to be my salvation.

After relocating the mouldering inhabitants from their dreary hiding place, and transferring the relentless mite orgies to another closet, I began to convert this most unpromising of spaces into my writer’s desk. Extended hoovering sessions followed by the ‘lick of paint’ led me to a sudden realisation; there is a fantastic advantage to living with a ninety-year-old in their own home. Possessions gathered over a lifetime lurk in every corner. A trawl through the darkest, most cluttered recesses of the house offered up a montage from some of the greatest artists who ever lived. This inspiring gallery now lines the cupboard interior and offers a feast for the eyes as inspiring as anything ever viewed through a glass windowpane.

Finally, I feel at home, sitting with my back to the grim, prison watchtower and staring into my freshly decorated, closet.  Whenever my most inspirational muse disappears on a coffee break, or is suffering from a Monday hangover, I need only look up from my keyboard to draw on six hundred years of creative insight. It seems to me that my closet has developed a view all its own.