Jeremy Turk 1,012 words

It all began with me sitting at my laptop surfing YouTube for interesting classical music performances and recent new electric car reviews. I recall a pleasant aroma emanating from the kitchen round the corner and the other side of the hallway from the ground floor single bedroom I was seated in, aka my study, aka the cherry soda room because of the garish paint colour I had insisted on for the walls. It was only when my better half started shouting hysterically that I suspected something might be amiss. The pleasant aroma had begun to develop into something increasingly more acrid and unpleasant and I sensed the atmosphere around me was becoming distinctly foggy. Having received little by way of coherent replies from the wife to my repeated invitations to tell me what might be amiss, I wrenched myself away from my online musings and walked slowly, then briskly, then cantered into the kitchen. I was faced with billowing clouds of foul smelling, metallic, suffocating fumes emanating from our microwave oven. My wife had managed to open the door to it, thereby discontinuing the oven’s activity. However, her actions had in addition opened the way for further massive amounts of stench-ridden toxic smoke to burst into the kitchen area.

This is what had happened. We have, well had actually, an ingenious variation on a hot water bottle composed of a generous helping of oatmeal encased in canvas fabric. The beauty is, well was actually, that you pop it into a microwave and heat it for two to three minutes. The result should be a highly flexible and pleasantly warm sac which moulds itself readily to whichever bodily part is causing you pain or distress. Unfortunately, our microwave timer had clearly developed a fault. Having pressed the start button following what we had thought to be a duration of no more than three minutes, the timer had defaulted to its maximum of ninety-nine minutes. At that point we had exited the kitchen and gone our separate ways, me to the cherry soda room, and my better half upstairs to “The Den” where our main computer resides in addition to my hi-fi system, my vinyl record collection, some overpacked bookshelves, my piano, a spare television, and a sofa bed for occasional guests. And so, the oatmeal sac and contents had continued to roast, and roast, and roast.

Coming back to the present, I managed somehow in the midst of the overwhelming, dense toxic clouds, to find the oven gloves. With eyes closed as a preventative measure against possibly irreversible ophthalmic chemical trauma I felt the way into the microwave and was able to clutch the circular glass table on which the fuming mass was sitting. I removed the offending article from its environment and carried it, with eyes still closed and breath held, through the kitchen area and then the door to the back garden. I dumped the mess on the resin pathway along the side of the house. I then proceeded to open wide as many windows and doors as possible to dissipate the miasma.

The microwave oven displayed a thick interior coating of ochre, offensive smelling, gunge, which I tried valiantly to remove with J Cloth and Fairy Liquid. It felt like an unpleasant variation on the cornucopia myth and reminded me of the state of London Underground train interiors before smoking was banned on the tube. However much muck I wiped away, more seemed to present itself. And there were areas such as thin vents to facilitate flow of air which were, and still are, seemingly inaccessible. Finally, beginning to shiver with the cold, we closed the doors and windows, and decided to tolerate the lingering odour.

Being gluttons for punishment we searched for and discovered a spare oatmeal bag and proceeded to microwave it taking especial care not to overrun the desired timing. Well, the bag and contents heated nicely with but a whiff of toasted cereal. However, inaccessible ventilation areas of the oven then let off further fumes. We have tried a nail brush, and an old toothbrush, but you can only do so much. And there is still a nasty whiff about the house which doesn’t seem to want to go away.

Is there a moral to this story? I don’t think so. I feel quite proud of how I managed to deal with the crisis. However, I remain anxious regarding what might have happened had we not gone into the kitchen and been confronted with the volcanic eruption. It does not bear thinking about. I also worry about the toxic fumes we must have inhaled but there is not much we can do about that. Embarrassingly I then used the J Cloth to wash crockery and cutlery, leaving them with the same impregnated odour. That will teach me. I also know now not to enjoy passively unexpected and not unpleasant aromas wafting from the kitchen when there isn’t any expected cooking. We are also questioning why our smoke alarms didn’t activate. We shall need to investigate this.

Interestingly, the episode has reminded me of another microwave drama which we experienced decades ago, probably four at least. We were the proud owners of a brand new work top microwave, and thought naively that it would be great for hard boiling eggs. All seemed to go well until there was a massively loud bang, followed by the microwave door flinging itself open, and eggshell and egg contents bursting out covering us and the surrounding kitchen area. My other half threw herself into my arms and hugged me tightly. Any other time this would have been more than welcome. Increased egg white and yolk volume in response to rapidly escalating heat can only be contained within eggshells for so long. Explode they will, and with considerable force. It took us a while to clean up the debris. Extraordinarily, the microwave still functioned.

But we don’t try to boil eggs in it anymore, and we now keep an eagle eye on the microwave timer.

A couple of lucky and narrow escapes.