Black stick

Weekend wandering: How long since you tidied up a cupboard or room?

This weekend David McMahon at authorblog asked the question 'How long since you tidied a cupboard or a room?'

Well this incident happened about two weeks ago and I had been intending to write a post about it but other events have got in the way. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was at a bit of a loose end wondering what to do with myself. I decided to make myself a cup of tea and have a think about things. So I put the kettle on and looked inside one of the kitchen cupboards while the kettle was boiling. A watched kettle doesn't boil so I had to do something. At first glance I didn't notice but then I looked again and thought something is wrong here. By now the kettle had boiled so I made myself the cup of tea then stuck my head back in the cupboard, to investigate.

Inside the cupboard, which is floor standing, has two shelves and goes round a corner, everything seemed to be standing in a sea of black. On the top shelf there had been a tin of black treacle standing on top of a tin of golden syrup. Now it wasn't standing on top of the golden syrup any more. It had fallen off and the lid had come off it. My baking ingredients were now standing in black treacle. I had known for some time that this cupboard needed a tidy up and now I could no longer put it off. Carefully I removed bags of raisins, sultanas, currants and packets of nuts, small bottles of essences and tins of cocoa and custard powder. I cleaned up what I could and transferred ingredients into plastic containers. Some were out of date so they just went out. Others had escaped unscathed as the black tide had not managed to spread itself over the whole shelf. I was thinking that I had caught this mishap before it found its way down to the bottom shelf but no I had not. Luckily the bags of flour were untouched but my packets of sugar were a real sticky mess. So I ended up with the sticky contents of both shelves around the kitchen sink and with a snake like trail of black treacle on the kitchen floor from the cupboard to the sink. Doing all of this, with my at the time housemaids knee which I could not bend, was no easy task. Having cleaned the inside of the cupboard, as best I could, with the shelf in situ, I then had to man handle the shelf out of the cupboard so that I could clean behind it. Initially I thought that the shelf had been fixed inside the cupboard before the outside had been put on but I did eventually manage to remove it. Once this was clean everything could go back. By now it was one and a half hours later and my cup of tea was cold.