(10 hours) #12 Ovens - SLEEPY Boring Objects (Jason Newland) (29th September 2021)

Hello, welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland, and this is Boring Objects. Hope you're well and all that. So I'm going to today I'm going to talk about ovens.

Ovens. Now I've used a few different ovens over the years. This is probably the first oven I can remember using.

Well, it wasn't that I was using it, but I used to, when I was a child, probably around the ages of nine plus, I, my dad used to like to have me and my brothers doing manual work around the house, or preferably in the garden, you know, do like moving one dirt pile from one end of the garden to the other for no apparent reason. His logic, his philosophy was holidays are for working.

So hey, and we used to do stuff like that.

What I did, I thought I was going to decided to manipulate the situation, because didn't really want to be outside in the horrible weather and dig in and like for just for just pointlessly doing stuff like that. So what I did is I pretended to be interested in what my stepmom was doing in the kitchen. And she used to bake quite a lot, make cakes and stuff like that.

So I would help her instead of helping my dad, which meant I could be in the warm. And I could look at my brother's getting wet, and getting tired and filthy dirty and I could wait until they looked in, I could stick my tongue out at them. That was the highlight of the day really.

I think their highlight of the day was later on get me back by punching me. So I used to pretend to be interested in cooking and baking and stuff in order to escape being outside, digging and weeding and all those other pointless activities that really aren't needed in the garden. You know, these things like weed killer that you can put down, you don't need to have lots of flowers and stuff if you don't need them.

But you know, it's a personal preference. I think if I had my own garden, it just it's not that I would concrete it. But I might just have a patch of grass, you know, a bit grass, lots of flowers.

Well, if nature provides flowers, then goody, goody, goody. But if it doesn't, then it doesn't. Not that bothered really about flowers.

I'd always go to the shop and buy flowers or just wait until it's night time and steal flowers from next door's garden or from the local graveyard. I mean, it's loads of flowers around for free. So not that I would do anything like that.

But I'm just saying, you know, if I was that way, that way minded, which I'm not. And so you know, I'd pretend to be interested in cooking and baking, when the reality is the only thing I liked about cakes was putting them into my tummy. So, I guess I did help to bake, you know, I learned how to do stuff like that.

And I, it's a skill I've never used. But I don't suppose I'm not sure if I really had much to do with the actual oven itself. We got on, on first name terms.

But I didn't. I think I was quite young. And I think my stepmom wasn't sure whether I'd be able to handle the oven in a safe manner, which was expected.

And I mean, I did burn myself a few times. I remember, I'd burn myself and later in the evening, my dad was kind of arguing about whether it was safe for me to be in the kitchen. If I was gonna, you know, end up burning myself and my stepmom said, well, it's natural for people to burn themselves on the oven.

You know, there's two of us in there, the kitchen is not huge. And it's bound to happen occasionally, you get a little burn on the oven. And my dad said, yeah, but on his tongue, how do you get burnt on his tongue? How's that an accident? And they both laughed.

And they started doing the can can dance. For some reason. It was quite popular back then.

So Bad Manners had a song out. And it was like, it was I think it was called the can can. So they played out very loud.

It was a little bit like musical chairs sometimes, because when the song came on the radio, no matter what they were doing, they'd stop. And they start doing the can can dance. So after one incident, you know, my, my, my stepmom told my dad that we'd have to stop playing the car in the radio, the car radio in the car, the car radio in the car, as opposed to the bicycle radio in the car.

Because you can get bike radios, you know. But I just, it's a bit loud, because if you've got the wind and the traffic and need to have it on quite loud volume, and that just doesn't seem fair on other people to be forced to listen to your specific taste in music. Although back then, there was only three different radio channels.

And so there wasn't a lot of choice. Although we did have the pirate radios, which used to be these pirate radios would be a pirate channel. And there'd be boats that would be anchored in the sea.

And it was illegal, but they used to play music and stuff. And we were able to listen to it. And I think what I forget the name of one of them.

What was it? Oyoye captain, I think that's one of them. And where's my parrot? That's another one. Stop treading on.

Yeah, stop treading on my foot with your big wooden peg. That was a long title for a radio station. So that was probably my first experience with an oven.

Second experience with another and probably was when I worked in a bakery when I was about 13. Maybe Yeah, 13 ish. And although I didn't, I didn't have a lot of much of a relationship with the actual oven itself.

I just felt we like different things. We just didn't really click. But sometimes the, the owner, the boss of the little bakery, because it was a bakery in a restaurant.

And the restaurant would sell baked goods at the counter at the front of the restaurant, which seemed to make sense to me, because if it'd been at the back of the restaurant, it would have meant people traipsing through and possibly kind of interfering with those that were trying to have a nice restaurant meal at their tables. Plus, I suppose the there was a window display, which was very popular with wasps.

And it was nice, because I always decided because I've always been, I've always been, I've had a lot of respect for wasps tasting cakes.

So you know, if I go into a bakery, or shop or something like that, I always choose the cake where the wasps are most like hanging around, laying their eggs or whatever they do, making love to the sponge. I always choose that particular cake, because then I know that I'm going to enjoy it, because I have a very similar taste to wasps. Also, I like honey.

And you might think, well, what's that got to do with wasps? My answer is, well, wasps like honey. And some people confuse that with bees. Bees don't like honey.

Bees produce honey. They don't like honey. That's what bees poo out.

They poo out honey. Wasps just like to eat it. So, you know, I'm like a wasp in that way.

And when I was a kid, I had a hell of a sting. So, well, it was a stick with a sharp edge. But yeah, kind of a sting, kind of.

And when I was working in the bakery, it was called the Bake House. And there was like a little entrance to the side of the restaurant. And you wouldn't know it was there, unless you knew it was there.

And there was a gate, just a gate. And you'd walk in there, you'd open the gate. It had a, just a standard gatey thing, you know, like the metal thing that you push down and it opens.

There's a standard gate, nothing special. Go in there and that's where the Bake House was. It was always warm, which is nice.

Apart from in the summer, when I guess you don't really want to be in 100 degrees heat when it's hot outside. But I, in the winter, oh, it's lovely. Bit strange though, coming out of there to snow and ice and, and because it was on the seaside, it had that cool air.

So even in the summer, on a like an average day, it would be nice and cool. And, oh, quite nice. And that was probably one of my favourite jobs I ever had.

The only problem really was I had to start very early in the morning. I think Sunday, I'd work a Saturday and Sunday morning. You know, during the, during the year, apart from holidays, and then I'd work every day.

So in the summer holidays, I'd work probably seven days a week. And I think I was earning like 40 pence an hour or something like that. So it was pretty good.

I reckon, I reckon I could earn 20 pound a week. With a full week, probably not, probably about 15 pound a week, with a full week's work. I've never been so excited.

And I had this little routine, when I would finish work, and they'd pay you every day. They'd pay me every day as well. And you'd take a little wait, your little hour slip up to the counter where they sold the cakes and the doughnuts.

Oh, I loved filling the doughnuts. Those those two jobs I loved the three, three, three different jobs that I liked the most. In that job, I had three different tasks, I guess you should call them.

The first one was breaking the eggs. I loved breaking the eggs. And because it wasn't, you know, like, if you're at home baking, you break maybe two or three eggs or four eggs.

This was hundreds of eggs. It was really good. And I learned to break two eggs at the same time, one with each hand without getting any shelling.

Now to be fair, if you're baking on such a big level, you know, quite making so many loaves of bread and cakes and pastries and whatever, a little bit of shell doesn't really, it's not really noticed. As opposed to if you're just making one cake. I guess it's like, it's like urinating.

If you urinate in a swimming pool, it's not noticed because it spreads. Unless you've got that that dye that kind of makes it go green or red or whatever. But they didn't have that when I was a kid.

Pretty sure. And so you can get away with it in a big swimming pool. But in a, I don't know, a sink or something, it's more noticeable.

It's more, I suppose the fact that you're sitting in a sink, urinating or standing on a chair, urinating into a sink in the kitchen. Yeah. Yeah, I did get, did get caught a few times.

I mean, during science lessons, they had sinks in there. And I thought everyone would be too busy and interested in what the teacher was saying. Because he was talking about volcanoes and volcanic ash and stuff like that.

So I thought, I'll just have a quick, you know, go to a toilet in the sink. As you do. Everybody noticed.

Everybody. But that's not really got much to do with ovens, has it? So I had all my other favorite jobs, my other favorite tasks in the bakery. The second favorite was I forgot what it is now.

What was it? I was gonna say collecting my money, but that's not really a job, is it? Filling the dough, well, making the doughnuts. Because they had me filling the doughnuts with jam and then sprinkle them, you know, rolling around in a big bowl of sugar. And then they allowed me to actually cook the doughnuts, which is you just fry them, stick them in a frying pan.

Yeah, just fry them. And it's very easy. And they smell so good.

So, so, so good. And the smell, the smell just of them on their own, when they're hot, is beautiful. Much nicer than when they're cold.

Because they're crispy. And you know, when they're cold, they can get a little bit soggy, especially once they've filled with jam. But initially, if you eat one that's cooled down enough in order for you not to burn your tongue, or whatever part of your body you're using to eat it.

So, lovely, very crispy. So, I used to enjoy, really enjoy filling it with jam. And there was this pump.

And it looked a little bit like a big tin opener. I'm just thinking, I'm just remembering that I was struggling to fill them with jam. And they did say that's a tin opener.

But the actual jam thing also looked like a tin opener. This big long thing, that used to be able to fold down. And it had a, like a nozzle at the top, which could turn.

That didn't do anything. It just, it's like a little handle. And you could just push it down and squeeze.

And the jam would squirt. You have to put the end of that nozzle bit into the actual donut. Otherwise, it wouldn't go in.

It just, it just, it'd be almost like a donut, a bukkake, you know, just like, just be all over it. So, you need to put it inside. You might sound a bit weird now I said it out loud.

But that's how it was explained to me by my boss. And I think at some point he did get pulled up about how he spoke to children. But he was the best boss I ever had.

He was absolutely brilliant. He was funny. He was kind.

He was gentle. And it was brilliant. Really great man.

One of the best men I ever met. So I won't say anything bad about him. Because there's nothing bad to say.

He was just lovely. And I remember when I got the job. I just said, Can I have a job? And he said, Yeah, that was it.

And, and when I when I when I left, because I mean, it's part of me wish I was still there. Which is a bit strange, because, you know, based on the amount of money I earned that I'd have been living in poverty for the last 50 years. Although I kind of have at some points in my life anyway, but I've hardly been rich.

That's a fact. But it was very low pay. But in the bake house, it was it was nice.

It was warm, sometimes too hot, but that's okay. The radio was on. So listening to Where's My Parrot FM or whatever.

And it was, it was fun. Time went quickly because early in the morning. You know, I got there sometimes I think, on a Sunday, it was 5am.

And on a Saturday was six. And on a Sunday, it was five. And I didn't wake up till about 1030.

And we finished at midday. So I only really had to work an hour and a half consciously. The rest of the time, I don't know what I did.

I was just walking around like a like a teenage zombie, I guess. So the second favorite job was the doughnuts. It was okay, filling them with jam.

The hardest ones were the ring doughnuts, because like, where does the jam go? And my third favorite job, probably my favorite to be fair, it wasn't my third, it's the other job, you know, this is my favorite one. And for different reasons, is taking the cakes down. So the my boss would put the cakes in these, and they brown or red trays, like the standard baking plastic trays that bread and stuff gets delivered to supermarkets and shops and stuff like that.

And I would take them down the stairs, there's one set of stairs, and then turn left. And there's another set of stairs, which led to the kitchen, and walk through past the part where I would be filling the doughnuts with jam. And then through the doors on the right, because there was two sets of doors, one incoming and one outgoing, because it was a very busy restaurant.

And because there was no one else around, and no one had come in to start cooking yet, that didn't really happen till probably, I don't know, 11 o'clock or something. And I would then go, so I'd go out the door into the restaurant and walk all the way down to where the entrance was. And there was this kiosk.

Well, basically, it was not a desk, what do you call it, a shop has, you know, where the till is one of those things. But in the window, there is this whole glass cabinet display unit. Now, I actually decided to display the stuff, because I thought that's what the job was.

And after that, no one was allowed to display the cakes, apart from the staff selling it. So they had to start coming in half an hour early to put them out on display. Because apparently, I stacked them all too tight.

I basically just shoved all the cakes in together, squashed them all in to this big glass cabinet, and managed to close the door behind. And well, according to my boss, that wasn't the way it was done. But I didn't know any better.

You know, no one had trained me. I just thought that when he said put them in the glass cabinet, in the display cabinet, he didn't say put them out nice or display them nicely. He wasn't specific.

So I just chucked them in, squashed them all together. That day, they had to re-bake all the cakes. Yeah, he wasn't very happy with me that day.

But he was still kind and nice. He was a nice bloke. Roger, his name was.

Really, really top man. And so what we did then, we just had to pile them up like the not the cakes, but the what do they call it? I don't know what they call them. Plastic trays used to because they was they had holes in them, I guess, as a like a vent for the hot cakes and bread and stuff.

And then I have the it's still around now, I think the supermarkets still use the same kind of trays to deliver food, except the differences, the ones they deliver food in had an opening at the front. I like openings. And we used to stack them on top of each other.

But what I could do, and it wasn't just me, I wasn't the only thief. We used to, I used to just eat cakes on the way down. And I remember once, I think we perhaps got a little bit carried away and there was only three cakes left at the restaurant.

I over did it a little bit. And Roger was saying, who's had the cakes? And I said, I don't know. He said, why is a jam all over your face? Quick as a flash.

I said, it was from the donuts. And he said, so you've eaten the donuts? I said, yeah. So I kind of put myself in a little bit, because there was no donuts either down there was one.

I dropped that on the floor. So I didn't want to eat that. So I put it back to be sold to the customers.

And as I said, I was young, I didn't, I guess I didn't think about the moral consequences of my actions. I used to have the cakes and it was so nice. And I remember once, once, Roger was like, where you been Jason? You've been down there for 15 minutes.

It's a two minute job. We've got stacks of cakes still to go down into the restaurant. And he put a lot of feeling into his voice.

I really got to go down into the restaurant. So I knew that he meant business. And I just explained to him, I thought quick as a flash, I'll get out of this.

I had to wait for the cakes to cool down before I could eat them. And then I realized what I'd said. Oh, what am I doing? I mean, as far as lying goes, it wasn't, wasn't, I wouldn't have got a good mark at school for that.

Not that I ever got anything but a bad mark. I don't think I ever got, I never got above a D in school. Not quite sure why, because I suppose because I'm not very clever.

I can't figure it out. Maybe. So that was that job.

Occasionally, he would let me put stuff into the oven. But with supervision, with supervision, he said, I'll never say a word again, word, I won't even lie about him, I won't say a word against him, because he was, he was brilliant. And I got on really well with his son as well.

His son used to tease me, because I was little, I was, I said, probably about 13. His son was at that time, probably about 1819. So not a lot older.

Just counting out my fingers, maybe six years older. And but, you know, he was, he was funny. And he teased me, but not in a horrible way, you know, he was very friendly with it.

So I liked him a lot. And Roger's mum as well, she was really nice. Very pretty.

And she's very friendly as well. She, I think, ran the restaurant upstairs, because there was two levels of the restaurant. What I don't understand is how they, because you go there now, and it is a restaurant.

But it's little, it's not big. It used to be huge. I mean, I worked upstairs as well.

Because I didn't just work in the baking place. Before I worked in a bakery, I worked in the kitchen, doing the washing up. So we had a washing, a dishwasher machine.

And I would do that because they would just continuously bring in plates of like, you know, dirty plates and stuff that needed washing. And I would do that a few nights a week. Again, a good job, because I generally have someone with me.

And we'd have a laugh. You know, tell jokes and talk about monkeys sometimes. I liked to talk about monkeys back then.

I quite wanted to have a monkey, little monkey, not a big one. But a little one. He, my friend, he wanted a big one.

Like, what's that gorilla from Clyde? Remember the Clyde? The orangutan? I was more interested in not even Tarzan sized monkey. I like those tiny little ones. I don't mean so little that you need a magnifying glass.

You'd, you know, you'd, you'd, you'd lose him in a box of matches. I meant probably big enough to cuddle. Because that's really what I wanted the monkey for is to cuddle him.

And then sometimes they'd ask me, do you want to work upstairs on a Friday night or Saturday night, doing a washing up up there? And I'd say, okay. And it was another restaurant up there, which I didn't even know. Honestly, didn't even know.

And I think up there they did things like wedding, weddings and funerals and you know, other kind of celebrations like that. And it was, it was nice. It was a bit more, I would say upper class, just a little different.

I think it was just a bit, a bit more intimate rather than, you know, just general public coming in and asking where all the cakes have gone, why there's no cakes today. And, you know, people like that moaning. I'm trying to think my next, I was at school and I used to use ovens at school because I, I didn't have any interests as far as school goes.

Didn't like any of the lessons or the teachers apart from two. I liked my maths teacher. He was lovely, Mr. Johnson.

And he was the first teacher that was really nice to me in high school and showed an interest and, but he got ill and he never came back. He had the most amazing hair, a really fine jet black hair, a little bit like little man on a prairie. Do you remember that show or my way to heaven? He had that kind of hair like long.

I don't think it was curly. I'm pretty sure it was very straight and he had a beard, big bushy beard that was also black and he's very friendly, very caring, very attentive. And I think had I had him for all of my lessons, we would have got sick of each other.

Now, had I had him for all my lessons, I think I might have actually learned something because I just had this respect for him, I guess based on how he was treating me. Anyway, he, he left for illness reasons and the maths teacher after him, it just went downhill from there for me and I didn't learn anything. I didn't even learn how to do fractions.

I understand fractions as far as, you know, half, a quarter, three, two thirds, three thirds, all that stuff, eight, six. I understand the concept of fractions. I just adding up fractions, I found difficult.

Now, I could, adding up easy fractions, obviously is easy, isn't it? So if you've got one third plus one third, it's a quarter. So it's easy, quite easy, you know, thing to do. One quarter plus one quarter, seven eighths.

So, you know, it's, it's, it's quite easy. But, you know, when it came to exams, I just, I just struggled a little bit. I mean, algebra, I can't spell it.

And I don't understand it. But then I never tried. I remember talking on the phone to this lady when I was selling car insurance.

And she said to me that when she was at school, she was an absolute, not tart. She was an absolute, what's the word? Not moron. In her words, this is her words.

She's trying to think of the word. And she basically, she thought that she had no academic ability whatsoever, especially concerning and mathematics. Those weren't her words.

She was a bit more like forceful with her description of her inability regarding that particular subject. And then she said to me something. She said, all these years, I thought that my brain just didn't work.

And then I took a course in maths as an adult. And I think she was probably in her 20s at that point that she took the course, the first course. And now she teaches maths.

She realized that she did understand maths. It's just she didn't understand it the way that it was being taught to her. She realized that she understood it really well.

Not only that, she actually loved it. It was a passion for her. And she went on, got a degree in maths.

Now, I'll be honest with you, I think if I was gonna really get a degree in any subject, and you're gonna say, what's the hardest subject I could pick? It would be maths. But also if I was to get a degree in any subject, what would be the biggest accomplishment of my life? Academically? Yeah, I think having a maths degree would be, it would be the biggest accomplishment probably of my life.

I say that, but recently, a couple of months ago, I was constipated.

And when I was finally able to, should we just say, cure myself of that constipation? That was the biggest accomplishment of my life. Some people say, oh, you'll never experience the bliss, true, true happiness, until you have a baby and you look at your baby for the first time, hold them in your arms. Well, I beg to, I beg to disagree.

I, I don't think any, any sense of accomplishment, accomplishment, or happiness will touch how I felt when I finally managed to dislodge the log from my colon. That was true happiness. Yeah.

So what other things? I'm starting to get the urge to read a book on mathematics. That's strange. It's not going to happen.

So the next instance with ovens, I worked in a chip shop. So I used to use the oven to cook pies. And that was it really pies and sausage rolls.

And what else was it? There might have been something else, maybe sausages, but probably not because the sausages could be cooked in the fryers. No, yeah, I think it's just sausage rolls and pies and nothing really happened there. I had my own oven in the first flat I had, which was upstairs above the chip shop.

That didn't get used very often. I think the next time I used an oven really, other than in like this home circumstances would be when I worked in a bakery, like a big industrial bakery. And to start with, I worked in the kitchen in the canteen.

So we would use the oven a lot for, you know, making pies and sausages for the breakfast and all the different things. So there's a lot of oven use for cooking. And I was taught how to make a lasagna by my boss, who was the chef.

And he basically taught me how to make a lot of the bigger dishes for lunch, because we were there for breakfast and then for lunch. And the evening was more a sandwich kind of thing, which we weren't there for, because we'd be gone by five. So we'd start at seven and leave about half four or five.

And he got me doing it, so he didn't have to do anything. I didn't realize. So he just said, oh, we're having lasagna today.

Get on with it, Jay. And then he'd go and he'd stand watching the fruit machine being used by all the workers from the bakery. Well, not all of them, but the ones that were using it at the time.

And he always knew when the machine was ready to pay out, because he'd wait and watch. And then he'd walk over when it was empty. And he nearly pretty much always won.

And I think he probably doubled his money, his wages, probably just by doing that. Plus, he didn't have to do any work because he had me doing it. And then I got made redundant from that job.

But the bakery took me on to actually work in the bakery itself. Now, that's when I really got to experience the heat of ovens, because I burnt my arms continuously and my hands. It was probably the most difficult job I ever had physically, because of the heat and everything like that.

But I used to burn myself. And I didn't burn myself, but I used to, the trays would hit my arms. And the manager, my line manager, found it hilarious.

And he said, well, you've got to learn. And I kept, you know, this short sleeve top on. And then after the first week, he gave me a long sleeve top.

I said to him, why don't you give me a long sleeve top to start with? He said, well, you need to learn how to not burn yourself. And the best way is to have a short sleeve top on. I said, but I'm scarred for life.

He said, stop being so dramatic. Why are you always crying? I said, I'm not crying. I'm just saying that, you know, I've got all these scars on my arms.

He said, look, they heal and they will disappear. They're just surface marks. And I said, okay.

We had a bit of a cuddle and we made up and it was fine after that. I'm trying to think of other places where I've used ovens. There was an oven incident at a party where a comedian friend of mine, well, we went to a party of a couple of comedians.

They invited us. They were from Australia or New Zealand, you know, Australia. And there's a lot of people there.

And my friend lent back. He was in the kitchen. It was a kind of party that was so busy that you had to, it was everywhere.

He couldn't actually tell what room you were in. Plus, I didn't really know the layout. I've not been there before.

Anyway, he started screaming and dance. Well, I thought he was dancing, but it wasn't. He'd burnt himself because someone had left the grill on and there was oil in the grill and the oil went all down his back.

And he's still got scars now from that. And there was that. And I think he had to leave and go to the hospital and stuff.

I didn't leave because I didn't want to. And then I was trying to think what other oven things. I think that's pretty much it.

I mean, I had, I've had normal ovens loads of times, different places I've lived, shared ovens. I've got my own oven now. The first one I've ever actually bought, although it was six odd years ago that I bought it.

Doesn't get a huge amount of use to be honest. But the worst oven I ever had was this, the place I lived before I moved here. And it had, it was a camping oven.

Wasn't even big enough for a pizza. It was a rubbish, crappy little thing that buzzed. It was almost like a wind up, a wind up oven.

You could hear it like, bleu, honestly. At first I did think, oh it was a bee got in there. But it wasn't a bee, it was the oven.

And it was just ridiculous. It took probably three times longer to cook anything than it should. sometimes I you know if I was having porridge and I was cooking a porridge in the oven it took so long I actually have to take it with me on the bus to work the oven mind you it stopped buzzing when it was on the bus because there was no electrical cords to connect but yeah actually there was a bit pointless really wasn't it no wonder the porridge didn't taste very nice in fact a bit cold if I'm honest

well it's something new that I've learned so yeah that's my stories of ovens I'm sure there's many stories of ovens that I've forgotten and just maybe repressed but I can't think of any other ovens that I really need to mention so that's it so thank you for listening remember to be kind to yourself because you deserve to be happy lots of love bye