I am building a small kitchen at present which is something of a novelty.

In the past, whatever else was going on in the workshop, there was nearly always a kitchen on the stocks but, since we were struck-down by B. Ahern and his cronies, I have had no enquiries: it was as if a switch had been turned off and, from what I hear from colleagues, I was not singled-out.
The custom-built kitchen market is as good as dead because, since few houses are changing hands and less are being built, there is now small demand for the 'must have' luxury kitchens of the so called 'tiger' years.

The external disciplines imposed by kitchen design and manufacture, in those heady days when it was a question of selecting jobs, had me regard them as a bit of a chore but, as I say, to be building one now is something of a novelty - so much so, that time has been allocated to re-build the working area of our own kitchen which is a task that has been in the planning for a full twenty-five years!

My mother came to live with us in 1985 and, in preparation for her arrival, we decided we should improve the kitchen. - God knows what it replaced, but a hasty trawl through the mill (at that stage merely a few short years into its task as a dumping-ground) provided us with what we have lived with since!

The fault attaching to this tardiness in providing a respectable kitchen is mine, and mine alone, but, if there is an ameliorating factor to my failure, it is that 'everybody loves the kitchen' (or so they say) so it remains today, as I said, as it has been for a quarter of a century!

So, if and when I get round to the improvement, I had better get it right!