Olives

No – there have been three found objects inducing forgetfulness this week. I found a pot of olives in the bottom of a rucksack I sometimes take with me to the shops.

(Monday evening, boiling a pan of pasta: Did I buy those olives I was standing looking at? Except I couldn’t find them in the fridge. Then why was I blocking up the aisle for five minutes, trying to determine what St Clement had to do with olives? I served the pasta without them in the end. I bet I paid for them and didn’t take them home.)

Sometimes I walk around holding household objects and put them down as soon as I start thinking about something else. Last weekend, when I was trying to engage with the in-need-of-translation thing, I left a pack of cotton wool pads on my bedside table and, apparently, a box of coloured pencils in the bathroom.

I need to do the housework with a satchel on.

Tins

Oh dear. I really do have that many tins in the cupboard. Soup tins and spaghetti tins and bits-of-plastic-in-a-metal-sauce tins, but mostly, soup tins. I’ve only been in this flat a year ot two, or there would be yet more.

Tomato and minestrone and tomato-with-a-bit-of-basil-in-it and I’m not exactly going to run out of vitamin C, am I, if there’s suddenly a crisis in the British supply chain, although I’ll never be able to use that saucepan for boiling milk again.

At least it’s not just me. My parents’ larder has tins amalgamated from three different households. Sometimes when I visit them I open the larder and stare into it as if something inanimate will speak up and tell me what to have for lunch. (I’d really rather that it didn’t.) Who on earth bought that flavour of soup? There’s a good chance she isn’t even on earth any more.

Teaspoons

The last time I moved house, I bought a new set of cutlery – beech-handled (or rather beech-effect-handled), to match the floors.

Ever since then, the handles have been falling off the teaspoons. Not off the dessert spoons, not the knives, and not the salad forks, just off the teaspoons. They do it when the spoon breaks through the chocolate shell of those childish Easter cakes from Cadbury’s. They do it in just-past-freezing ice-cream. One of them even did it in a pot of tiramisu.

And now it’s happened again, with the last-but-one teaspoon, sending a bite of Easter cake on a triple salto down behind the laundry basket.

As household emergencies go, there are many worse (many, indeed, foreshadowed by the boiler that likes to say grrr clunk). Still, searching for the perfect teaspoon has suddenly become my plan for Easter weekend…

Things I do not like

Slicing the top off a green pepper, slipping my thumb inside to shuck it or hull it or whatever it is you do, and gripping another baby green pepper inside instead of a core of seeds.

I do not like this at all.