Me, Irascible!

I have disliked the bloody machine ever since it was squeezed into our kitchen. It sits malevolent in its innocent white drop down door. It was instant abhorrence since the day Jan took my empty plate (without letting me rinse it properly) before shoving it into the guts of the infernal contraption. Quickly whirring soon after a tiny blue block of alchemy she elbowed into an equally hideous slot container on the inside of the door, it sang its drain blocking smirks.

Just days, weeks and even months of years before I had happily stood in front of our sink listening to radio 4 or classic FM whilst leisurely doing the washing up, tea towel drying, even putting away, was a sequential pleasure, now denied me via that costly lump of plumbing that I hate. I could happily ignore the machine for the next eighty decades but Jan seems to like the lazy slothfulness and I have unfortunately built an intense dislike of an inanimate machine that purrs pure water weariness.

Plates, dishes, glasses, even cutlery is swallowed daily in her box of one sided delights and my stoic refusal to accept this new technology is of course juvenile but I don’t even want to come to terms with technological modernity.

In fairness, Jan did offer to show me how to press its buttons but I refused saying “I can’t fly the washing machine or set up the coffee percolator and as sure as God made little apples – I’ll pass on learning anything about the dish washer”.

That got me to thinking, what else I either can’t do or don’t know how to do! Jan bought me a lovely new mobile phone about a month ago. You know one of those phones that you see all the ten year old kids using – where they swipe their thumbs across the screen like demented lunatics, well that phone is still in the box. I have no idea how Jan records T.V. programmes, what settings mean on the alien micro-wave and I have to get Jan to deal with my face-book and twitter messages. Come to that I barely know how to send emails but I somehow manage all these “I don’t knows” with a perpetual smile on my face.
Mike.