I’m standing in a pub garden. It’s a sunny afternoon, and I’m enjoying a glass of chilled wine whilst trying to keep an eye on my youngest who has run off to say hello to her mate. “The builder said that our kitchen counter was the biggest he’s ever had to install,” a friend says. “We got an absolutely enormous one, too,” another friend replies. “So big that it took six men to carry it into the house.”
I register a look of annoyance from the first friend who thought she was the “winner” in this bout of status jousting. “Well, the building company have basically said that our extension is the largest project they’ve worked on,” the first friend explains. “And it’s a real challenge because of the shape of our garden which is also super big too. It’s going to take at least eight months to complete.”
“Oh really that long?” my other friend looks doubtful now, then deflated. “I think ours will be quicker.”
Babies and size of babies is one thing people brag about. Or how many hours it took you to birth your children, and how little pain relief you had. Or how bad your menopause symptoms are. Or how you can touch your toes without bending your knees. But now? Kitchens, or more specifically kitchen extensions.
How long they take. The timelines. How the building regulations are “super challenging”. How they wanted to have a marble imported from some far-flung country but it didn’t arrive because of some obscure import rule so they had to compromise. The world is on fire but in this corner of West London we are focused on our kitchens – perhaps because it’s the only area of our lives we can exert meaningful control over.
What happened to quality chat? The kind where you talk about what films you’ve seen or books you’ve read. Or whether so and so has split up with their husband and is having an affair with their brother’s best mate – that one with the impressive hair replacement from Turkey.
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A few days later and I’m at a party. It’s a 50th. Some good noughties music. I find these things difficult as I only have a finite amount of social battery (like all humans), and tonight I can’t think of anything to say. I have talked a bit about how tired I am, but realise this is not very cheery. I want to ask the woman I’m stood next to whether she’s on Ozempic as she has a sunken in face and bulging eyes but realise she is probably just tired like me.
I join a new conversation and hope to get away with a couple of nods.
“We hope to be done by September. The thing is the work hasn’t started because we haven’t got the third party wall agreement in place. The surveyor is busy and keeps cancelling. It’s such a pain!” a man shouts whilst “Space Cowboy,” blasts out over the dance floor.
Just as I make a move to get away from this man he looks at me. “Got any plans to extend your kitchen?” he asks. It sounds vaguely threatening. In the old days it would have been something far more flirtatious like: “Do you want to pop outside and share a fag?” which we all knew was code for snog.
I shake my head and disappear into the toilet to take my super tight M&S support tights off for a few minutes and relax on the loo seat. The thing is we haven’t had a kitchen extension. The main reason? It’s expensive. We don’t want to get into even more debt. Also we are at ease with our kitchen. We accept that it’s small, and that if we have people over someone will turn the oven alarm on with their butt because there is nothing to lean against in a nonchalant way. Besides we don’t plan to throw parties because we’re old – also because people just talk about kitchens and work they’re having done to the house.
Perhaps I’m jealous? It’s true that it’s triggering when everyone in your neighbourhood has the “More Space”, board stuck up in front of their house. The scaffolding going up. The sound of walls being smashed down…
I tell myself that I wouldn’t want an identikit glass box on the back of the house. I’ve been at friends houses and after a couple of drinks have become totally disorientated, thinking that I’m in another friend’s house because their kitchens are exact replicas.
Okay, I would actually love a big kitchen but the thing is if I had this kitchen then I wouldn’t talk to people about it. I would just move into a house with a massive kitchen. I definitely wouldn’t bore on to friends or use it to demonstrate my superiority over others lower down the middle class food chain.
But yes okay, the more I think about it, the more I realise there is quite a bit of envy. Our oven juts out and there’s a bit of skirting board that falls off whenever you slam the door hard. The floorboards have enough food between them for a family of squirrels to live out their lives (crumbs, cat biscuits, old pieces of uncooked pasta).
Midlife is very much this feeling that you’re young one minute, in the cut and thrust of it all, going to gigs, being able to dance properly without people sniggering – then suddenly you’re 50 and the people you went to school with live in six-bedroom mansions. They have holidays in Tuscany. They have au pairs. They might own second homes and complain about their enormous tax returns.
The kitchen extension is just one of those things that differentiates success or failure. Like the boiled water tap. The ice maker fridge. The exquisite juicer that pulps everything up just right so you feel less tired and drained. The imported marble top that costs more than a package holiday for four.
Author Alain de Botton once said: “The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”
The massive kitchen tells the world that you’ve arrived. The blood, sweat and tears, the terrible job, the boss who belittled you at every opportunity, the massive remortgage, the months without an oven eating ready meals, and arguing with your spouse about what colour tiles to get behind the sink…were all worthwhile! You can stand in a pub garden and talk about third party wall agreements like the rest of your peers. You can die happy.
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