The Best Thing Here Is Ugly
The single most useful object in this flat is a beige plastic drying rack with a hairline crack running down one corner and a drip tray that has gone slightly yellow along the front edge. It sits to the right of the sink where anybody entering the kitchen sees it immediately. It has been in three flats with me. If I photographed this kitchen I would move it, and I know that about myself, and I have decided not to be too impressed by it.
The rack
It holds nine plates, which is more than it looks like it should. The wine glass slots are angled correctly, meaning glasses drain instead of pooling. The tray tilts toward the sink, so it empties itself, which is the entire feature and the reason two prettier racks failed after it.
The crack appeared in the second flat, when a full pan slid off the counter and clipped the corner. It has not spread in four years. I have thought about replacing the rack roughly once a season, usually after seeing a kitchen with an empty counter, and every time I get as far as reading about the drainage angle on some new one and stop. Nothing I have found tilts the way this one does, and a rack that pools water is a rack that grows a smell by Wednesday.
The second ugly thing
A heavy pot with a dent in the side and a handle that has developed a small wobble I correct by tightening a screw about twice a year. The enamel on the outside is chipped in three places and stained brown near the base where something once boiled over and stayed. It came from my aunt’s kitchen when she moved into a smaller place, and she was apologetic about the state of it while she was handing it over.
It is the pot I use for everything that takes more than half an hour. It holds heat like a stone. Nothing has ever caught on the bottom of it, including the things that catch on the bottom of everything else. If I had to leave this flat with one item from the kitchen I would take the pot and I would leave a lot of nicer things behind. My aunt asked about it at Christmas, in the way people ask about something they gave away and half regret, and I told her it does most of the cooking here now.
The pretty ones that failed
I have bought handsome objects that did not work. A wooden dish rack that grew a black line of mould along the bottom slats within two months, in a kitchen with one small window and no extractor. A set of matte glasses that showed every water spot in a way the shiny ones never did. A bread bin that was lovely and that I stopped opening because the lid needed both hands.
The pattern is not that good-looking things are worse. The pattern is that I chose those things while looking at a picture of them, and I chose the rack and inherited the pot in circumstances where the only question was whether they did the job. Looking at a picture is a different act from imagining a wet plate, or a hot handle, or one hand full while the other one needs to open something. I am better at the second kind of imagining than I used to be, mainly because of the bread bin.
What I mean by ugly
Not badly made. The rack is engineered fine, it just looks like what it is, a piece of moulded plastic in an unfortunate shade. The pot is a good pot wearing fifteen years of use on the outside.
What I actually mean is that they carry no signals. They do not say anything about me to somebody standing in the doorway, and for a long time I wanted my kitchen to say something. I am less interested in that now than I was at thirty, which may just be tiredness, but it has made the room work better.
Hiding things costs something
For about a year I kept the rack under the sink and took it out after washing up. What happened is predictable in hindsight: I stopped washing up in the evening, because the job now had an extra step at the front and an extra step at the end, and I would leave things in the basin overnight and face a cold greasy sink at seven in the morning, which is a bad way to start.
The rack came back out onto the counter and the evening habit came back with it inside a week. That trade is not close. A counter that looks slightly worse and a sink that is empty at bedtime beats the reverse, every day, and I would rather have the mornings.
An honest inventory
If I listed the ten objects here I would genuinely miss, the list would embarrass a magazine. The rack. The pot. A wooden spoon worn flat on one side. A blanket that has gone bobbly. A chipped mug. A pair of scissors from my mother’s sewing box that cut through anything and have a taped handle. A cheap plastic step stool that lets me reach the top cupboard and that lives, visibly, beside the fridge.
The nicest objects I own are lower down that list than I expected when I started thinking about it. They are still here, and I still like them. But the things that hold the days together are mostly the ones with a dent in them, and I have stopped treating that as a problem I ought to fix. The rack will crack all the way through eventually, and I will be sorry about it for longer than makes sense for a piece of beige plastic.
