Its not one of the top ten most reassuring phrases heard as you sit and relax, reflecting on a day done well, probably the Captain of the Titanic heard worse when the lookout spotted the famous ice cube, but for me "Whats that burning smell?" uttered by my beautiful and oh so patient wife Tracey late yesterday evening alerted me to quite a serious situation in the kitchen.
Rock HQ's heart is a Rayburn, a moody piece of equipment at the best of times, one that is periodically tamed by a SAS trained repair man called Steve the Rayburn, naturally. The Rayburn lurks with intent to incinerate it not treated with respect. Usually it ticks over nicely giving the cottage a warm rosy glow. We wander round the kitchen like ready brek kids when its roused from slumber and cooking for us. Left to its own devices last night something had obviously upset it as it was smoking heavily, black acrid smelling clouds billowed from its oven and when yours truly tried to soothe its fevered brow, the temperature gauge off the scale, past 500 degrees, a jet of flame some three feet high caused momentary anxiety that the Rayburn was trying to kill me. Armed with oven gloves and shouting something about its gone nuclear I frantically tried to remember how to disconnect the oil supply. Finally starved of fuel the beast cooled down and peace was restored.
Part of today was spent cleaning the soot out of it and generally trying to persuade the beast to behave itself. For its part it allowed a thorough cleaning of all its internal organs but steadfastly refused to warm up and is still sulking in the kitchen forcing us to eat sandwiches or microwaved meals.
A call to the SAS will be made on the morrow.
1 comment:
We had a stove try to kill us like this as well. We had three in the apartment we lived in for a few months and in that short time one exploded and the other overheated like this.
I recall we had to light them by opening up the fire and dropping a bit of burning paper into the diesel fuel in the bottom.
We left before they came up with any more tricks.
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