Sally-Part 139 . WHAT HAPPENED TO THE THORNTONS DAD ?

Today I discovered that two adults CAN be mentally broken whilst trying to work out how an 'Induction' oven works in a holiday home !

I MENTIONED OUR PROBLEM TO THE OWNER ! HE LOOKED GUILTY AND  MUMBLED AN APOLOGY ! HE KNEW !

Shirley discovered a converted railway signal box close to the Lake District and booked a few days here without thinking about me and how exhausted I'd be travelling so far from home and now, jet-lagged and up after a deep sleep following a harrowing seventy mile saunter I find myself on the edge of a nervous breakdown having been driven close to insanity by an electrical device !

THE PERFECT HIDEAWAY FOR TWO ! NO NOT FOUR WITH TWO ON A SOFA BED UPSTAIRS EVEN THOUGH THEY SAY IT IS AS THE TOILET'S NEXT TO THE ONLY BEDROOM DOWNSTAIRS ! SORRY !

I was upstairs, surrounded by the ghosts of long dead signalmen and their levers, shut in by a heavy fire door and still in a stupor when my tinnitised ears vaguely heard something being shouted at me about a 'potato's feelings' !

I waited like all men for the third summons before shuffling to the door which I failed to open and instead wrenched my wrist tendons because I hadn't yet discovered that fire-doors need seizure-inducing amounts of energy to open them !

"Did you call ?"

"Three bloody times you deaf idiot ! I can't use these stupid potato peelers that you have to pull towards you ! They're alright for carrots but not potatoes, especially these stupidly small ones so can you take over !"

I took the award-winning triangular shaped nightmare and taking the tops off only three fingers completed the job of peeling four small potatoes in well under an hour !

Then for the hob, an 'induction' thing without any instructions for the touch switches a three year old could operate !

We searched the drawers, the cupboards, the oven, the two hugely over-packed visitor-attraction files which contained instructions for every other gadget and the dishwasher several times without any luck and as we grew weaker from repetitively climbing and descending the steep stairs finally found them sitting by the hob !

SO what you do is touch an etched sensor for two seconds which unlocks another set of sensors before deciding which ring you want to work by touching another sensor for two seconds and choosing a number between 1 and 9 !

You then have ten seconds to press another sensor for God knows what reason before the thing automatically turns itself off and you have to do it all again !

Occasionally the chosen ring would flare red for a second before going black again and neither Shirley nor I had a clue what we were supposed to do !

As we clung weeping to each other with the now overcooked fish in a bag dried to a crisp in the microwave and the pre-microwaved broccoli (I've just been imformed it was cabbage !) growing steadily colder the hob suddenly kicked back into life for another second before once more going off which it then did repeatedly for the ten minutes it took to cook and mash the little bleeders !

I sunk in gratitude into my seat, opened the free bottle of red wine which tasted of harshness rather than the 'smoked oak' and 'vanilla ovetures' the label promised before we ate in exhausted silence !

Because I have no WiFi here, have left my guitar at home and without sufficient padding on my rear end can't sit on the rock hard kitchen chairs to write this Blog I have since sat on a leather settee through four episodes of Coronation Street and Emmerdale which are indistinguishable from one another, staring up angry nostrils as the characters lie there way through the supposed lives of people who spend their torrid waking hours in a pub in a permanent state of aggressive confrontation with each other, eventually sleeping with every other person in their communities, whether of the opposite or the same sex before being killed by a crashing plane, drowning after losing control of their cars and plunging into a canal at three miles an hour or burning to a crisp at the hands of an arsonist !

Shirley, lying over on the other settee with a now empty box of Thornton's chocolates on her chest who watches this tosh snored her way through the lot !