Yesterday I was in a whole world of shame. I had to endure the most humiliating experience - emptying out my entire kitchen with my mother. Don't get me wrong - I don't keep my pornography collection or my illicit drug supply in my kitchen cupboards. It's just the usual stuff. Food, pots, pans, electrical equipment, cutlery and crockery. Things that shouldn't bring me shame. The shame was the state that those cupboards were in.

I am not big on spring cleaning. Occasionally I'm moved to clean the odd cupboard, but I will stress the word occasionally. I've probably managed a good deep clean maybe four or five times since we've been in this house and we're coming up to 24 years here. So you can pretty much guess the condition that my cupboards were in. I started on the high cupboards because Mum is a little height-challenged. Mum started in the pantry. I'm sure she was secretly horrified about how many products were out of date. I think the most out of date thing was 5 years. (Ooops!!) But she restrained herself from gasping out loud or breaking down sobbing at where she'd gone wrong as a mother. She just discreetly pulled out a garbage bag and started tossing stuff. It'll make filling up our new pantry a lot easier.

When she finished the pantry she moved on to the pots and pans and discovered that I'm anti-cockroach-spraying. She managed to fill half a dustpan with bits and pieces from many dead roaches - a few wings, lots of legs and sometimes entire corpses that had died peacefully of old age.

It took about 4 hours but our kitchen is now empty and ready to be dismantled tomorrow. The oven is currently cooking its last ever batch of cookies and brownies and next week I'll be cooking in a shiny new one and washing our plates in our first-ever dishwasher.



Our lounge room has been temporarily converted into an open-plan pantry. It will be an interesting and creative week of food preparation. But I'm up to the challenge - and to make it all the more interesting this week marks week one of marathon training. Will I come out of all of this with my sanity? Keep watching this space.