So it seems that a lot of the stressful things that have been going on recently have been the very definition of 1st world problems but with an added extra. Partly because every time you throw the word Aga into a sentence it immediately makes you sound like someone who wears Hunter wellies and a Barbour and ends most sentences with “OK, yah?”. (I don’t have a Barbour. Lets not focus on my wellies.)
When we first inherited the Aga five years ago, I didn’t even know that you cooked on it in a different way from a normal oven, let alone how to cook on it. Now that I don’t have it, there’s so many things I don’t know how to do: I don’t know how to dry clothes or what to do when Spencer’s jumped in too many puddles and ended up with soaking shoes. Crucially it appears that I need to relearn how to cook: I burnt the first three meals I cooked in the oven in our rental house (and that was after grilling a shepherd’s pie). The other lingering question is how do we heat our new kitchen? We’re used to a toasty warm kitchen with the Aga heating it beautifully in the winter and the new kitchen area will not have any space for a radiator. Not sure what to do, what is normally done, or whether we need any heating in that area. Ho hum, more to think about.
There are also all the little niggling problems that come with moving into any new house to deal with. It’s really strange being tenants again and waiting for the landlord to sort out things like leaking taps, full bins and dangerous rubbish in the garden. It wasn’t the most auspicious start to move in and find that none of the bins (including the food bin – eeeuuurggh) had been emptied since the last tenants moved out a couple of months ago. Hopefully once these initial things have been sorted out, it’ll be a bit easier to relax and settle in. And I’ll have to keep looking at the view to remind myself of the good points too.
