Little wave goodbye to the microwave.

I never really used the darned microwave thing and there it sat gathering dust and taking up valuable space in the corner of the kitchen until last Sunday morning, that is. Last Sunday turned out to be ‘ruthless Sunday’. Ruthless Sunday? That’s like a normal Sunday plus me with an ungodly urge to clean everything and de-clutter the kitchen. Out damn microwave! Go forth in banishment to the filthy shed up the yard! Pictures of France stuck on my tiled wall with blu-tac! Non!! Off the walls with you! Clean spaces! I wanted clean spaces and some shelves for my herbs and spices and stack of cheap French glasses.

Kitchen prior to de-cluttering.

And so it happened thus. I humped the redundant microwave to its new home in the former coal shed. It will enjoy it in there all wrapped up in plastic sheeting next to my mountain bike that has never seen a mountain in its whole life. In fact it rarely sees daylight, but that’s another story. We needed to return to the kitchen post haste. Work to do!

The rectangle of grey dust that was revealed as the microwave went on its ‘holidays’ got sponged clean and lovingly patted dry and I then went to work ripping the French imagery from my kitchen tiles. I kept one image that I might frame, that of an old chap passing a baker's shop sans obligatory baguette. Once I had done that I picked off the bits of blu-tac and sponged the tiles to a state so sparkling I could almost gaze into them and tell my fortune.

It was all looking rather grown up and less like a Francophile mature student’s flat. Now it was time to drag the set of shelves, kicking and screaming, from the living room to the kitchen and to fill them up with les trucs française. Oh they would love this. Those poor neglected shelves had been sitting by the back door with nothing better in life to do than be sanctuary for the Yellow Pages and even yellower newspaper clippings and an empty box of matches. It was time they showed their true potential! What more could shelves ask for? Yes, a new life surrounded by foodie loveliness, constant sunshine pouring through the windows warming up all its wooden surfaces and be filled with artefacts.

Cleaner kitchen.

These artefacts included several French style glasses, a bowl I bought in Nice, one snowy February some years ago, a model bike with a pannier I purchased from a shop on the Paris metro, a Provençal style container for fresh garlic (or dead spiders) and a wooden pestle and mortar obtained cheaply in a sale at John Lewis’s because I was obsessed with purchasing one. Subsequently, said ‘pestle and mortar’ never got used for at least a month thereafter. I digress.

To celebrate the glorious transformation I made some Madeleine cakes. Two days later it is still looking good and I have a strange urge to start on the bedroom. I wonder if there’s room in the coal shed for a bed?