Honey I Melted The Oven

Oh dear.  That is all I can say about the sorry saga of the mini-aga.  Since our oven is on the blink we were given a halogen oven with all its bits but sans instruction booklet.  I looked it up on the internet but found nothing about putting it together so I just used my common sense.  But there was a bit left over (a bit of oven, not a bit of common sense).  Never mind, I thought.  It’s probably just some special gadget for roasting ostriches or something.  Wrong: it was an essential twingy to go between the very hot plastic top and the glass bottom.  Well, how was I to know?  My experience with halogen ovens to date has been extremely limited.  So I tried cooking pizza.  First the top sizzled while the base was uncooked.  Then the whole thing heated slowly without getting cooked to any appreciable degree.  And then the top of the oven melted, part of it attaching itself briefly to my arm and causing a rather dramatic burn.  ouch!  And now the oven sits there cold, melted and absolutely refusing to work.

* sigh *

Since returning from Sheringham I have been reading Bill Bryson.  I’ve come in for rather a lot of cheap or free books lately, though I did pay full price for a crime thriller by a local author in Sheringham’s rather splendid bookshop.  I can’t remember what it was called but it had a lot of local info in it so it was an interesting read.  Sheringham also boasts a new museum featuring the fishing industry and a spanking new section full of whizzy graphics about the offshore windfarm, which you can see every clear day doing its slow sad semaphore on the horizon.  I was pretty active on holiday: I walked, swam in the sea and cycled.  But it was on the steam trains that I made my best find: tucked away in a cubby-hole on Holt station was a tiny bookshop and in that bookshop I found ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho.  This was an excellent read, somewhere between Borges and The Prophet; and it kept me going in between a Peter May book (which I left at the cottage) and the crime thriller by the local author.

Bill Bryson happened after I got back: Andy was giving away some books and I scooped up a handful including ‘Notes from a Small Island’.  I can’t possibly give you a notion of how hilarious it is; all I can say is that I laughed out loud so many times that I was practically laughing the whole way through.  I demand that you read it.  I may even give you my copy.

Kirk out