I have mentioned in this column before that I have a sneaking suspicion that electrical machines can somehow communicate with each other and make a unilateral decision that when one stops working several more join it within a few days.
It's a 'when one of us goes,we all go boys' situation.
In my case it started with the alarm clock, working perfectly one day, dead as a Dodo the next. Then the video recorder, ditto. Then the tumble drier, tumbling but not drying. Then the washing machine, which has been hinting for weeks that it needs a holiday but pressed the point home a week ago by making horrible gurgling sounds, one anguished shriek and four shudders and then stopping with a full load of washing in it.
And now the cooker, which has been burning enough gas to keep the Albert Hall toasty everywhere but in the oven itself, so that it would be easier to cook your fairy cakes in the plate cupboard rather than on the oven shelves. Coupled with the arrival of the gas bill, or the national debt as we like to call it, it has not been a good month.
All this led to an emergency family conference to discuss various options.
Now I'm going to share with any of you gentlemen who read this column a little secret. Women's logic is a terrible thing and you really have very little chance of ever getting the better of it. How else could you explain sitting around a table to discuss the possibility of buying one small washing machine and a modest gas cooker and rise from your seat an hour later with everyone in complete agreement that what is really needed is a new kitchen. And the main thing is to make you think it was your idea in the first place.
The logic goes like this. New equipment has to be slotted into spaces where it fits and is not likely to fit so the kitchen units will need moving around and probably taken out anyway. So you might as well get a kitchen firm in to do a plan and they often have good offers for electrical equipment anyway and you will probably end up paying almost as much for a new kitchen with the said electrical equipment as you would for two single machines which wouldn't fit anyway. Sold to the man sitting at the kitchen table . . .
Not quite as simple as that, but you need to follow up with a visit to at least 15 kitchen firms next morning and acquire enormous piles of glossy brochures containing mind boggling measurement details and a price list which would make a chartered accountant leave the country.
My daughter had done the brochure collecting and seemed to have sussed out the measurements and prices remarkably quickly, so quickly that there was a slight suspicion that she had done some of this research in advance.She patiently explained the difference between16 millimetre cabinets and 18 millimetre cabinets (about £56 per unit as it turned out), my first thought being that such cabinets would be remarkably small until she crossly pointed out that it was the thickness of the wood they were talking about, not the height of the cabinet.
I wasn't brought up to fitted kitchens. The nearest most people got to a fitted anything was one of those kitchen cabinets with a cupboard at the bottom, a pull down centre section and cupboards at the top. The luxury version had a built-in spice rack (which nobody ever used) and a drawer in the middle and you might get a matching formica table.
Now you get thousands of colours and woods and wood finishes and revolving carousels and they mostly have American or Continental names such as the Manhattan or the Boston or the Biarritz. How come nobody every calls a new kitchen a Worksop, a Grimsby or a Leamington Spa?
And do you realise that they don't come with the tops? I mean, if you buy a table you don't expect it to come just with the legs do you? You expect the tabletop as well. And the same for a sideboard or a dressing table. But kitchen units come sans the top which you have to buy separately. So you can spend hours working out the cost of your neatly fitted-in kitchen and then realise that unless all your kitchen equipment is going to rapidly learn the art of levitation you are going to have to add the cost of the work surfaces to the total.
We are still going through this process. We have been round Boston, up Manhattan, across to Nice and made a quick side trip to Sienna, Riviera and Cannes and paused at Alaska and looked at a Madrid and a Granada. Excuse the pun, but they all Costa Lot.
There have already been one or two little hiccups. Firstly we will need to remove all the old kitchen and get rid of it. For which we will need a skip. For which we don't need a skip, said one of us, we can take it to the tip in bits. Having lived with someone for many years who used to say precisely these words and who once insisted on sawing a sofa up into manageable pieces in the middle of the sitting room floor so he could get it into his Renault, I don't think so.
Secondly, those other dreaded words have already been uttered. The ones that came after a discussion on getting the kitchen fitted. The 'we can do it ourselves' dreaded words.
Speaking as someone who once made an MFI bedside cabinet and didn't realise until I saw a similar one at a friend's house that the handy little rim round the top of my cabinet was not there to stop the early morning teacups falling off but was actually the base, I have a slight doubts about this.
So there it is. The year of the kitchen. The year of where the likelihood of having a holiday anywhere but nose to nose with roll edged worksurfaces is receding by the day. The year when I won't be going anywhere near the United States unless you count Boston or Manhattan.
It's all the fault of that washing machine - I really should have kicked it harder.