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Tried by the Centre Court
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Too Many Cookers
You wouldn't think, would you, to see him sitting quietly here, counting the house, that in fact he'd had a very nasty accident this morning? Knocked himself out at breakfast. He's got one of those pop-up toasters. Nasty things. I was worried; I thought I was going to have to get Rex Harrison in or something, honestly. They are marvellous when you think of it, aren't they, all these fabulous labour-saving gadgets we all have nowadays, like toasters. It's (just) that we never have time to use them. We've written a little song about this, it's mostly from the housewife's point of view. I think this will perhaps be of particular interest to those gentlemen in our audience who are housewives. It's called "Too many cookers".
When we had a old-fashioned kitchen,
Cooking was a slow but easy-going job.
A place to talk,
A place to sit and stich in,
While we kept half an eye on the kettle on the hob.
Cooks went the way of the dinosaur,
We struggled on alone.
Then science provided the answer:
Free the British housewife,
Give her a life of her own.
A kitchen on the modern plan may be a fancy looker,
But we've jumped out of the frying pan into the pressure cooker.
We have every sort of gadget now for every sort of chore,
But it's much more work and worry than it ever was before,
There are cables on the tables, with plugs of every shape,
And what we save in elbow grease we spend on insulating tape.
The fridge is quite prodigious at refrigerating grub,
But every forty minutes it goes bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub-bub!
We've confused by all the fuses, the oven changes gear,
Instead of a cook we really need a consulting engineer.
There's a pinger on the ringer,
We can't hear each other speak.
That thing on the shelf's been whipping itself for the best part of a week!
The pilot light is winking, we can't locate the switch,
We've every sort of gadget but we don't know which is which.
With our new pneumatic icer,
The self-actuating dicer,
The ideal for cooking ricer,
And the hard-boiled duck egg slicer,
With the universal grater,
And the patent desiccator,
The vibrating dehydrator
And the plastic percolator,
The electric coffee grinder,
The serrated bacon rinder,
The expurgable reminder
And the vermicelli winder....
Oh, we've every sort of gadget and it's rather odd to think,
We still can't open sardine tins and we still stop up the sink.
We don't want a labour-saving kitchen,
We much prefer the one we had before,
Why did science have to pitch in to our nice old-fashioned kitchen?
Please don't save us labour any more!
Originally from the album 'Tried by the Centre Court'.
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