Sharper Knives

It seemed a waste to Angela - that you could spend the same amount of money on a games console or a second-hand car as you could on some truly impressive kitchen knives.

Knives were Angela's grand obsession. She'd complain that people didn't keep theirs sharp enough, and she carried a whetstone in her bag. At house parties and gatherings, you'd find her in the kitchen more often than not, chatting and knocking back red wine while she sharpened the host's blades.

Our friend Jemmy had a set of decoy knives, since she disliked how sharp Angela insisted on making the edges - not everyone agreed with Angela’s explanation that sharp knives are safer than dull.

It got to be a joke about how well Angela would have to know someone before she would sharpen their knives. Not well at all, it turned out. After she died, I was forever meeting people who'd had this red-wine-fuelled woman attack their kitchenware.

Years later, I was round Paul's house, drunk enough that I could stand talk of the old days. He was drunk enough to show me a memento that he’d kept - a set of knives that Angela had sharpened the week before she died. He'd never used them. They still held a perfect edge, memorial to a lost friend.

Background

This was inspired by a Jay Rayner piece, in which he recommended "The kitchen knives in holiday rentals are always terrible; take your own". He’s not wrong.

I’m now in the third year of this mailing list, and I’m starting to think about working towards a larger project. In the past, I would start new projects by working on a structure and then filling things in. That’s rarely worked well for me, as demonstrated by the wreckage of so many half-finished projects.

This time, I’m doing something different. I’m trying to build things up from smaller pieces, grouping them together, until I can assemble something viable from them (a zine, a novella, something larger?). I’ve started doing this a little with the Swedish Pizza stories. And there is a half-built website for The South Downs Way which makes that coherent.

This piece, Sharper Knives, belongs to a larger story called The Monday Table. It’s about a group of people working in the food industry. That theme might sound ridiculous, given my poor reputation as a cook - but that is part of it. I love coming up with tiny stories about food. The Cooking Pot is probably part of this larger structure, as is Fridge Secrets. Maybe a few other pieces I’ve shared here.

Of course, this is about the slowest possible way I could try to write a novel, but I’m OK with that.