In the midst of decluttering...

...we are suddenly in an acquisitive vein.

No real surprise, that: but I have a quandary.

My regular electric kettle is dying; it has to be twizzled around on its stand until it sizzles into an electrical connection. Growing fed up with this, I dug out the old one - which declines to work at all. Le sigh.

Okay, I need a new kettle. This is indisputable.

One can pick up new kettles tolerably cheaply.

On the other hand, for some time now I have been pining for a kettle with a variable temperature control. I drink a lot of green and white teas, which want their water at eighty or eight-five degrees rather than boiling; it'd be dead handy to have a kettle that would reliably do that.

First such I ever saw was in America, but there are suddenly a handful on the market over here. I could walk into town right now - if I weren't waiting to go to the dentist - and buy a rather beautiful black example. *wants*

But, they're all around the seventy-quid mark. Which is a lot of money for a kettle.

On the other hand and further to this, I note that I sit here in a house with two dead-or-dying electric kettles. Kettles that boil on the hob, they take longer, but they do not die so readily. Maybe I should go all retro? There is seldom that much hurry, after all.

And one of the variable-temperature kettles, it is one that boils on the hob. Tho' I'm not clear actually whether that just has a thermometer on the side to tell you how hot it is, rather than whistling to draw your attention when the water reaches a pre-set heat, which the electric ones will do.

Oh, I dunno. I'm torn. Also my neck and shoulders hurt, and I am not looking forward to spending a long session in the dentist's chair. Sweet though he is, my Tim. (He's been looking after the horrorshow that is my mouth since he graduated, I was practically his first patient; he now has grey hairs and two hopeful children, whose reading habits I try to guide from a distance. He's very upset about this tooth, poor boy...)

Maybe I should go clean the cooker or something, some job so awful that an extraction will seem sweet relief...

Lose weight now; ask me how

1) Have parts of your body removed. Douglas Bader was surprised at how easy it was to pull himself about on his arms, after his legs were cut off. Myself I thought I'd start small, and am now lighter by one (1) tooth and a quantity of blood. Dentist continues to be baffled, why that tooth hurt so consistently even after he root-canal'd and backfilled it. I think we both wanted him to look at the root and cry "Aha!" - I think we are both now anxious lest the cause of the trouble was elsewhere, despite all evidence. We shall see. But not today, we shan't. Am safely numbed up for hours, and

2) Fast. I should perhaps have eaten before I went? Am now forbidden food, besides having great bleeding crater in my mouth and utterly numb jaw, hence small inclination. Also forbidden hot fluids; "choose cool drinks", it says here, which sounds to me like beer, except that it also says to avoid alcohol. Um. Beer isn't very alcoholic?

Gazpacho!

lamentables is a genius. "Gazpacho?" she said; and so happened that I had roasted tomatoes, and a green pepper ripening to yellow, and smoked garlic, and sourdough bread, and really all I lacked was a cucumber. So a quick saunter down the road and back, a sneering glance at my disassembled cooker - burners? who needs burners? - and a whizz in the blender, and lo: I have a lovely white cup full of thick slurrupy gazpacho, scattered with salt crystals for the occasional healthful crunch. And now I am going to forswear working, and go sit in comfort and read the adventures of the goblin Jig for an hour before I drift Lit-and-Philwards for a meeting.

And if so be that I wind up in the pub afterwards, well. I'm an invalid; of course my judgement is impaired.