to my kitchen, before demolition

why am I emotional? | plus! latest obsessions

We made the last roast on Sunday. Not a proper roast - it’s summer, after all - but M roasted a chicken, because it does the same things to him that making a ragu does to me, and we had his brother over and C joined us, scavenging potatoes with his hands and getting them tapped in the process. There won’t be another one, not in that oven, at least.

I can’t express to you how deeply I hate the oven. It leaks heat through the hob so cooking at it is akin to being in a sauna. It takes 50 minutes to cook some chipolatas and yet I have never failed to not burn aubergine in it, and I love aubergine. It is a bad, bad oven. The builder is confident that it will get picked up by a passer-by. I am not so sure.

This time next week the rest of the kitchen will be ripped from the walls and moved into what we used to call the playroom, where it will live for at least three months.

I hate the faux-wood, grey, endlessly sticky lino, which is never clean. I hate what I’ve called the “shit pillar”, a ghost from chimney breasts past. I hate that the worktops are, in some places, only 28cm deep. M, a man of unerring patience and limited practicality, hated the handles on the top cupboards so much he removed them about eight weeks in. I hate the fact the lighting options are either interrogation-room bright or off. I hate the inexplicable venetian blind. I hate that I spend dinner looking at a boiler. I hate the little bit of worktop behind the sink that is never dry.

And yet, I feel strangely emotional about the year - and it is, almost exactly, a year, we have spent in this kitchen. For it has seen an awful lot of life.