Adventure to the mundane
Some months ago now my toaster gave up. Tripping the fuse board as the spring was pulled down. A new fuse and a clearing of the crumbs failed to fix it. The toaster was, quite literally, burned out.
I like a bit of toast. My daughter likes a toasted waffle or bagel. And who doesn’t like a toasted hot cross bun?
Yet we live rurally, without ready access to purveyors of electrical goods, and more to the point, would “a need for toast” really be an essential journey, necessitating a trip to our nearest big town?
As the days wore on and I instead looked to the grill on the cooker for my pain grillé needs, thoughts turned to whether I actually needed a toaster at all…turns out that the longer time taken to make toast under the grill is about the same time as it takes to boil the kettle and make a pot of coffee so it’s not as if I’m hanging about doing nothing and just waiting.
Fast forward three months.
The kettle is now bust too. It’s long had the whiff of inevitability about it, for the last three years or so the lid has been held shut by parcel tape as the wee catch had burst, meaning that filling up was done via the spout. No biggie. I wasn’t even being tight, just trying to be environmentally minded by not buying a new electrical product as the kettle was still boiling water and switching itself off just fine.
There’s always the cheap gas-cartridge camping stove on standby in the porch for the (far too regular) power cuts we get here in the rural west Highlands and it’s no great hardship to use it on occasion; if anything it brings a sense of adventure to the mundane on the times it’s called into action. I can always pretend I’m back in my much missed Volkswagen campervan when I fire up the butane burner and await the whistle as the kettle boils…it’s made me think, strangely, in these uncertain times of the things we take and took for granted, the comfort we’ve all taken in small things over the last year.
While Covid has been devastating for so many people, families and businesses, it has also meant we’ve all had to seek solace in the (now too) familiar surroundings of home. Those lucky enough to have a garden or a wee bit of outside space, and I am grateful to be among them, have been able to get outside, perhaps rekindling a passion for growing vegetables or rehoming some chickens. Old books have been re-read, favourite albums revisited as we wrap ourselves in the blanket of the prosaic. Sure, we have embraced the new where we can: Netflix series, podcasts, different recipes; but it is in the comfort of the familiar that we humans find peace.
The pandemic, whilst bringing challenge and necessitating huge change has not, I’d suggest, been a time to actively seek to make things difficult for ourselves. If anything, a return to the simple pleasures of a slice of toast and a mug of tea, helped along by a whistling kettle, has been exactly what the doctor ordered.
