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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Wok Disposal

I moved house last weekend. My modest rented accommodation seems to have generated enough useless stuff to whip car boot sellers into an excited frenzy.

The local Oxfam now looks spookily familiar, but there are only so many woks, fondue sets and Dan Brown books that even a charity shop can handle.

Ken Hom has a lot to answer for. Maybe there is a wok graveyard somewhere, in fact I am surprised there isn't a dedicated wok recycle bin outside every house. Perhaps UFOs are just woks flamboyantly discarded by frustrated owners, who's wok cupboards are bulging with unwanted duplication. They might come in useful with the flash floods this country seems to be experiencing at the moment. Attach one to each foot and run quickly across the water.
There should be a public wok register to stop unwanted presents for those that already posses one, which I bet you do. It would work a bit like TV licensing in this country, everyone is presumed to have a wok unless they give notification otherwise, and even then they are disbelieved.

Don't get me wrong I love wok cooking, I just don't need ten of them.

Why do we insist on having lots of stuff around us? Well I suppose stuff is a sort of memory map of your life, like an interactive diary. Its hard to get rid of memories, no matter how reassuring your Buzz Lightyear looks standing proud in your corner cupboard boldly surveying the premises.

After some digging around I eventually assembled my wine, a modest, eclectic bunch of bottles.

One bottle of Moet (calmly and patiently waiting for a celebration), one Vin Santo (never tastes quite the same in the wet UK), one quite extraordinary Italian wine, the bottle extravagantly heavy, label undecipherable, a cheap M&S chardonnay, an excellent Medoc Bordeaux, a bottle of Prosecco and a bottle of fino sherry.

Each bottle of my rather limp collection is still a wonderful memory map of the vintage, a time capsule subtly massaged by various chemicals over the years (months in the cheap chardonnay case), all designed to ease your mind from the trials and tribulations of wok disposal.

Most of the wine I drink is bought and drunk within a few days. I would like to join a wine club to boost my ailing collection. Any suggestions welcome.

Buzz and I, together with endless boxes, are now happily rehoused.

1 Comments:

Blogger JuiceCowboy said...

If you like CA wine, give WineQ a try. You sign up and get a Q (or queue) like NetFlix, set how many bottles you want and how often (2 bottles every month or 3 bottles every two weeks, whatever you want) and they ship it to you. Then you just go through the site and add wines to your Q. If you spend $35 then shipping is free (so thats like 2 bottles or so).

They're focusing on small wineries that don't have wide distribution so the value is really high. Some award winning wines also...

Good luck!

7:16 PM  

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