Mr Alfred Muggins' Small Melodrama In The Kitchen

     Muggins came into the kitchen. Chaos!! He could see at least two tops off things (and that was just at first glance!) The milk was still out on the side and its top was nowhere to be seen! Consternation! How long had it been out there for? It had been a couple of hours since Mrs Muggins had been in the kitchen, and evidently the milk had been out of the fridge all that time! And with no lid on!!

    Where on earth was the lid? She did things so fast, and so well, but frequently he found she did not put things away after herself. She blamed him for making a mess sometimes, but it wasn’t true at all. Alfred never consciously made a mess! He was always putting things away, and specifically putting the lids back on bottles and jars etc.

     He could not see the little green lid on the kitchen worktop, so where was it? Desperately he looked at the floor, knowing that occasionally things got dropped there, unimportant things, like lids, for inexplicable reasons. He had the horrifying thought that he would once again have to go to one of the drawers to find the foil, which had been there quite reliably in recent weeks. He would have to tear a piece of foil and use it to make a makeshift lid. The trouble was that, sooner or later, the foil lid was bound to be knocked off in this house, and the other inhabitants and visitors would not recognise what it was, and would not put it back on the plastic milk bottle, and he would be back at square one again.

     As he often said to Mrs Muggins milk bottles and jars actually come with their own lids, for no extra cost, so you can look after them, and keep them fresh, and preserve them. And even cheese actually came in its own packaging and so could be left in it. There should be no need to make makeshift foil lids or find new freezer bags to put cheese in that had mysteriously lost its own packaging and you couldn’t even read what kind of cheese it was, or what its sell by date might have been.

     “Ah!” he exclaimed. Suddenly he had seen the top. It was on the floor in front of the washing machine. He could not imagine what clumsiness might have put it there. All he knew was that it had happened all too frequently in this house!

     Swiftly he acted to preserve the milk, sniffing it so he could be assured the milk had not gone off yet in its long stay in the warm kitchen without its lid. He rinsed the green top under the tap, and screwed it completely back on, before popping the 4 pint plastic milk bottle back in the fridge door, but having to move the quite unnecessary Coca Cola bottle that had taken its place in the door, which didn’t even need to be stored in the fridge, which was otherwise quite full, as he and Mrs Muggins had only recently been shopping the other day.

    The other item was a jar of marmalade, but thankfully he could see its lid nearby on the kitchen surface. “We don’t want the marmalade going off,” he swore angrily under his breath. He swiftly put the lid on, and put it back in the right place in the cupboard, where he would easily be able to find it the next time he needed the marmalade, which would doubtless be quite soon, as he was addicted to the delicious stuff! (a bit like famous Paddington, the bear, with whom he had that in common, and Mrs Muggins too it seemed, who said only the other day that she had never had much marmalade until she met himself Alfred. She was now as keen on marmalade as he was, which was probably why its stocks went down so fast in their kitchen these days. They do say, of course that you can tell whether a man, or a woman, is honest, by how much marmalade they eat! And he believed it too!)