This is my new oven glove. It’s a ‘show’ oven glove. Meaning it’s not actually to be used as an oven glove, but rather it’s to remain on display, on a peg in the kitchen, to ‘show’ visitors we own a fancy oven glove. 

It’s possible you’ve never imagined such nauseating levels of pretension. But, if you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. 

Show pasta is never eaten. Show soap must not be lathered. Show candles must never feel the lick of a flame. We’ve got show olives, show spices, even show peanut butter for fucks sake. I’ve become what I hate. A middle-class grotesque. desperate to attain a level of cultural satisfaction that doesn’t exist. It’s like a never-ending episode of Richard Osman’s House of Games, the prize is ‘good taste’ but you can never figure out the bloody Answer Smash.

 

 

The oven glove is new (come on, it’s technically a garment) and by Dusen Dusen (so boojee they named it twice). They do expensive striped towels, expensive striped robes and now, expensive striped oven gloves. And just to be clear, I consider £25 for an oven glove expensive. I dare say Dior do an alpaca one covered in Fabergé eggs for a grand. But as far as I’m concerned £25 is pretty much top-end for something you use to handle oven chips.

But as I say, I won’t actually be using my Dusen Dusen glove to handle anything roasted, poached or fried. I’ll probably even keep it arms length from the Breville. At the very most it’ll be used to handle our (ridiculously impractical) Japanese metal kettle. Mostly it’ll just hang on a hook, making it clear to anyone who sees it just how fucking posh and sophisticated we are.

 

 

For the interested, the actual business of being a functioning oven glove will remain the remit of our old glove. It’s by Ferm Living, and once it was the star of the kitchen, right up to the point we started using it.

As soon as you take an oven glove from occasional kettle-handling to grill pan juggling it’s all over. Before you know it you’re using it to wipe up coffee spills and swat at wasps. Then one day you realise you’re fist-deep in a dirty protest. Serving your Aunt Bessie‘s while up to your wrist in an Alien face-hugger is not a great look. That said, we still need to use it, for the humdrum task of actually holding hot stuff. So now it lives covertly in a drawer, a practical, albeit cheek-reddening, secret.

 

 

Life is full of this nonsensical window-dressing. Occasionally we have oven chips for dinner (something a professionally specious fool like me struggles to admit in the first place) and we’ve now taken to sharing them from a separate enamel bowl. You know, like in a diner. ‘Do you want your chips ‘diner style?’, I’ll say. It makes us feel very exciting.

I’m in a confessional mood, so I’ll leave you with one more example of this bourgeois baboonery. Although actually it’s less about social-climbing and more about me being so infantile I can hardly believe I’m a grown man.

 

 

Put simply, I won’t walk around in public carrying toilet paper. You know those big 12 roll ‘briefcases’ of wipe that come with their own carry handle? I make my girl carry them back from the shop because I think people will assume I’m off to a bum-wiping party.

Basically, I don’t ever want anyone to think I go plop plop.

There, I’ve said it.

Welcome to the 9th circle of lifestyle: insanity.