Moving House, Moving Kitchen

Stories of moving house, and moving kitchen.

Episode contributors:

Ruby Mason
Ruby is an editor at SAND, a Berlin-based journal of contemporary writing and art (www.sandjournal.com)

Margaux Vialleron
Margaux writes the newsletter The Onion Papers: https://theonionpapers.substack.com/

Maria Agiomyrgiannaki
Maria is originally from Crete, now living in London. You can find her on instagram.

Stephen Rötzsch Thomas
Stephen writes the newsletter Ideas With Legs: https://ideaswithlegs.substack.com/

Matthew Curtis
Matthew is a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief at Pellicle. 

Eli Davies
Like her doctorate, much of Eli's work is focused around women and home building; you can read some of it on Tribune here. She is currently writing a book about single women and cooking.

You can listen to Kitchens if you haven't already! And buy the print zine too.

Support Lecker by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and now on Substack.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Full transcript after the embed

Home building

[00:00:00] Lucy Dearlove: This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove.

Tea. Sesame seeds.

On this episode, home building. Stories of moving house. And more specifically, moving kitchen.

This is actually really good spice storage though. Loads of space. This is actually going to be a similar setup to the way I had them before, which was kind of like a corner cupboard with a thing that pulled out and you could just look down and see all the labels at the top and read the names from that and now this is a corner cupboard but it's a carousel thing and I think that's going to be the best way to keep them.

Oh, and there's this other little, like a really sort of slim tool. Oh. Okay, so there's this like little sort of like small unit with like enough space for spices on top and then like bottles below But the previous people haven't emptied it, So we've got some paprika, some ground cinnamon, lots of, lots of, um,

just lots of spices in there. I just nearly dropped that. It smells very overwhelmingly of clothes, all these brown

clothes.

And we've got,

dark light soy, rice vinegar, I've literally just put the exact same bottle of rice vinegar in there, olive oil, sesame oil, Shaoxing wine. I mean I would actually probably use these, but it's also kind of annoying because I don't need them because I already have all of them, and I don't know if they just forgot to take them or

couldn't be bothered.

I do understand that. Because packing is so tedious. The worst. By the time it came to the kitchen... I was exhausted. We had already spent days sifting through the things that we had acquired and held onto over the past decade, whether they were beautiful or useful or not. It had worn me down and I could not face doing the same in the kitchen, so I left them.

We paid a removals company more money and they sent someone down a day early to efficiently pack our belongings into boxes. In the kitchen, he packed it all, unsorted and unrefined. The old kitchen was separate, square, with cabinets arranged in a U shape under the counter, and two levels of open shelves above.

The shelves and the counter were both made of orange formica, a splash of colour that cheered me every time I walked in there. So the kitchen in

[00:03:06] Ruby Mason: my old flat was quite small. A lot of Berlin kitchens are kind of long and thin because older buildings were often built without bathrooms because there were shared bathrooms downstairs, kind of in the backyard, like outhouses.

As things got modernized, they often just sliced, a kind of slice off the kitchen and made it into the bathroom.

[00:03:28] Margaux Vialleron: My old kitchen was a morning kitchen. It was facing east, it had the most incredible aquamarine color, and I would just bathe in the light every morning. I sat on a tiny stool I left all day long there, and just put some coffee on and started working.

[00:03:48] Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: 100 percent the kitchen that sold me on, the house that we ended up in. It was this beautiful space. They'd extended the back of the house, and so it was a quite long kitchen. It had room for an island. The doors were painted all this pastel ish sort of green, and there was this huge curved granite worktop, as well as the granite on top of the uh, on top of the kitchen island.

Our landlords, before they... Moved out and now back in, had lived in the house that we were then in, and so they decorated it for them. It wasn't like other houses we'd been in which were just bland and grey and beige and, you know, kitchens in the corner of the living room.

[00:04:32] Matthew Curtis: You know, it's a two up, two down terraced house in South Manchester, but the kitchen hadn't been cleaned.

And it was massive. So, I just spent some time in there cleaning it and getting to know it. The oven didn't get hot properly. It basically had two settings, lukewarm or raging hot. It had a gas hob. I love to cook, so I sort of worked around it. And it was fine, but I never really felt particularly inspired to cook in there because it didn't feel like a space that I wanted to spend much time in, which is depressing.

[00:05:13] Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: My old kitchen was in a garden flat behind Turnpike Lane bus station. Haringey became home very quickly and the kitchen was quite small and kind of L shaped. It had a big window above the kitchen sink overlooking a fence with like ivy on it and it had a door that led out to a Big, paved garden.

[00:05:44] Margaux Vialleron: I think that was the thing I loved the most about this kitchen.

It had a door. I could close it and it became a room of my own.

[00:05:51] Ruby Mason: Kitchen had a, had like a bright purple, yellow and blue and red mosaic all over kind of half of the walls. Kind of loved it, kind of hated it. Other than that, it was just kind of a space where over the years we gathered a lot as kind of a changing shared flat with various flatmates.

[00:06:09] Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: The sink was huge and ceramic and could fit in anything you needed it to fit. The oven was a big gas range. My first time cooking with gas since I'd been a student and I really didn't have any idea just how sticky it could get the things around it, but I loved it. I loved cooking in that place. This was, this was a space that had been planned.

[00:06:34] Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: So before we moved in, we asked the landlord to put two big shelves up on one wall. And one shelf ended up having all of my spices and herbs and the other shelf was all my various um dried beans and pulses that I bring back from home from Crete. Once the lockdowns were over and the rules eased then we started hosting people in the garden and the kitchen was always a massive mess but it was a haven really.

[00:07:04] Ruby Mason: I was there for five years but I used to hang out there before I moved in because my friends lived there. Parties. An improbable number of people would cram into that kitchen.

[00:07:13] Lucy Dearlove: I think about a birthday party at my old flat. Everyone in the living room while my friend and I are squirreled away in the kitchen, several drinks in, hysterically pulling pork with forks that I'd cooked in the instant pot.

My friend was wearing a billowing pure white top and I'll never know how she didn't end up wearing the sauce the pork had cooked in.

I had intended to cook something symbolic on our last night in the flat before the packing started, knowing we wouldn't be able to get in the kitchen after that. But after spending the afternoon eating a pub roast for a family birthday, neither of us had the energy or the inclination to figure out what to cook, it.

And so Rory ordered take away from a nearby Jamaican place. An earlier take away from the same shop was actually the first meal we'd eaten in the flat. I didn't move in then because we hadn't been together long, but Rory invited me round with his friend and we ate jerk lamb and rice and peas sitting on some Ikea cushions on the floor because Rory hadn't bought a sofa yet.

Not that long after that, we spontaneously got engaged. After a night out in Deptford, there's a lot of life here. Unfortunately, the takeaway isn't as good now as it was then, and we had to eat it in bed because the living room was full of boxes, piled to the ceiling.

[00:08:35] Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: One more thread, I guess, that run through all these four years of us living there were, was My, um, my tomato e eggs.

So, and lots and lots of different variations of like, type of scrambled tomato, e eggs, shaka type eggs, menna type tomato, e eggs. So lots of different, um, brunch variations of these eggs, those kind of tomatoey scrambled eggs was the first thing that I learned to cook as a, as a kid, uh, from my maternal grandmother.

The next question you ask is the last meal I ate there and I think most probably it might have been a version of those eggs, some tomato y eggs, so you know everything being packed.

[00:09:22] Matthew Curtis: Everything was in boxes and we ordered a KFC. Um, and just ate chicken and, and dunked hunks of chicken in delicious gravy, ate some chips, and had a couple of beers, and that was fine.

It seemed fitting. It was a meal of, um, necessity.

[00:09:42] Margaux Vialleron: It was the last day in the kitchen. I had packed the house and in fact I had moved most of the stuff the day before. So I was just standing with the last few boxes and you know cleaning products and I had gone to the corner shop in the morning to grab one of those Activia pots to go because I needed something easy and that required no instances whatsoever.

And I'm famously quite unlucky and the yogurt factory making industrial era failed me on this one, there was no spoon.

So I just crawled through some glass boxes and found this wooden tong and just ate this yogurt out of this, standing in there. And, you know what, looking at it now, it's easier to mutate, I guess.

with time. It was the best last meal I could have ever had there. It was, it was one of my own and I liked that.

[00:10:39] Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: The last meal I cooked there was apricot glazed hake and it was from Lurato's cookbook Africana which came out last year and has instantly become one of my favorite things to have nearby and to cook from almost every other week maybe.

I liked how vivid the flavours were and it felt like a nice choice, a really comforting choice to close out that sort of chapter of cooking with.

[00:11:07] Ruby Mason: The week of my actual move I had food poisoning from Takeaway Sushi, which was pretty awful. So I think the very last meal I ate in that flat was probably like dry crackers.

[00:11:19] Lucy Dearlove: When the movers brought the boxes up to our new flat, I started unpacking almost straight away. The boxes they'd provided had writing on the side requesting you to cut, not rip off the tape sealing them, so that they could remain strong and be reused. The kitchen boxes, there were six or seven of them, were clearly labelled in black marker pen.

Kitchen cups, etc. Kitchen cups, cutlery, etc. Kitchen pots, pans, etc. Kitchen various. Kitchen tins, trays, plastics. And inside everything was individually swaddled in sheets of off white recycled paper, which unfortunately the movers could not take back and reuse, so we were left with bags and bags of it.

Everything that was in the boxes had been treated with the same delicacy, from practically unbreakable stoneware mugs, to precious fragile stemmed cocktail glasses. I found this surprisingly touching. It was around this time that I realised the full consequence of not dealing with the clearing out of the kitchen as thoroughly as the rest of the flat.

I'm in trouble with Rory because I brought all the condiments from our old fridge and the fridge is literally full. It's, it's full. We don't even have any food in it. It's just like two bottles of wine and then 800 jars of chutney and sauce. So, I'm gonna have to do something about that.

It's so weird because like, the fridge doesn't seem smaller than our old fridge and the freezer is like a fridge freezer and the freezer is actually bigger than our freezer. It's got an extra drawer, and it's definitely bigger, so I was like, great, the fridge is gonna be probably a bit bigger as well, but I don't know if it's just shallower or something, but it definitely feels a lot more full with those condiments in than my fridge, my old fridge did.

I wanted to get on with it, have the boxes emptied, tape cut, flattened out, and collected so that life could start, but I wanted to do the unpacking well, get it right. And that felt like trying to figure out who my future self would be. What would she cook here, in this new kitchen, in this new town? Where should the spices go?

Where should she put the toaster?

[00:13:53] Eli Davies: So what happened was, I started my PhD in the beginning of 2017, essentially, and um, my PhD was looking at, it was a sort of literary, it was an interdisciplinary literature psychology project. about women's experiences with the troubles. It started off being about that, the big public narratives, so it was kind of trying to look at hidden...

story. It's three months into my PhD, my, my 12 year relationship broke up.

[00:14:26] Lucy Dearlove: Eli Davies had been interested in domestic life and the home already as part of her doctoral research at Ulster University. But this dramatic life changing about face in her own circumstances forever changed how she looked at the environments we build around ourselves.

[00:14:42] Eli Davies: When I left my, the home that me and my partner shared, I walked away from all of the stuff that we'd built up, that we'd bought over the years, because I just couldn't face it. It was quite a painful process, and I just was like, I can't deal with this, you can take it all. Apart from a few choice things, like my Le Creuset, like, cats are old.

I'm like, I'm like, I'm keeping that. Um, so, when I moved into my first sort of, My own close break up phone. I had to buy all of that stuff again I'm realizing, you know things like a cheese grater or a potato masher or you know, these things that you don't necessarily you forget that you're going to need.

So that is obviously a really important part of the work of home building, which is a, which is, is work. Like it's not talked about enough as work, but it really takes a lot of emotional, physical energy to do it as well as money, as well as resources, as well as, you know, material resources. So there's that.

And then. All of the kind of emotional layers of cooking and eating, which for me at that point, like in 20 17, 20 18, were very bound up with my relationship, you know, being in a relationship with a man, entertaining people, and I loved cooking and I really enjoyed doing all of that. But there was this, I was left with this like icky feeling about like, oh, what, what was I doing there?

Like, I was performing as well. Very sort of Wifely role.

[00:16:31] Lucy Dearlove: Eli sent me an article she wrote about this for the literary magazine, the Tangerine in 2019. I occasionally curse the Eli of that moving out week. She writes, I make pasta one night, get out a block of cheese from the fridge and then remember, I don't have a grater.

We had two in that last flat, I think ruly. This work of building a home can be a happy occasion, but it can also just be fraught. For Eli, constructing this space, both physically and metaphorically, meant mentally extricating herself from previous tensions within her domestic life, allowing her to reconstruct a home on her own terms.

[00:17:09] Eli Davies: I had this moment, and this was in the last house that I lived in in Belfast, actually, where I was watching a Jamie Oliver 15 minute meals or something. He was on the Food Network and I was just looking for something to... To watch, and he was getting some spices out from this kind of whole wall of drawers behind him.

And I just, this feeling, this pang, I was like, I want that! And I was like, oh god, what's happening to me? Like, I'm craving all of these really sort of bourgeois, like, you know, kitchen, sort of Jamie Oliver esque, like...

features, but it's like, you don't beat yourself up about it.

[00:17:49] Lucy Dearlove: Coming to accept that the kitchen was an important space for her meant kind of acknowledging and casting aside the baggage of previous homes and relationships, because it's home.

[00:18:01] Eli Davies: In the kind of fraught, this fraught process of home building, the kitchen is, I realise is the place where I can I can do that. I know how to do, you know, I know, I feel comfortable in that space, the living room, the bedroom, you know, putting up pictures, all of those things are very, very, I find very, very daunting tasks, I'll put those things off, you know, buying nice little cushions for the sofa, all of that, I feel quite comfortable.

Stressful and overwhelming, but when it comes to the kitchen, you know, I've got like seven types of vinegar in my cupboard. I've got, you know, .

[00:18:41] Lucy Dearlove: Something Eli has also learned is the value of observing how other people build their own homes and their own kitchens. I

[00:18:50] Eli Davies: was living with, my parents live in Cardia for six months and I was back and forth to London quite a bit and there was very things like friends and friends with friends.

Yeah. That enabled me to kind of spend some time in London. And that was so fascinating, going into different people's kitchens, because that obviously, again, like, that's where I want to get sorted, you know, I want to work out, like, I'm going to make my meals and, you know, and what store cupboard things they've got.

And that was just so interesting, like, looking at how the kitchen was a sort of window into, like, what people value

and how important cooking is, obviously, but also What kind of cooking they do, and who they're cooking, and who's being cooked for, who's doing the cooking. Yeah. Um, and also things, like, I hope I'm not sort of publicly shaming anyone. Well, I'm not naming, no names, but like, there's this thing that I noticed, and you know, I feel like there's a lot of shame around home building as well, like people feel like I'm not doing it properly.

Agreed, yeah, yeah. Domesticity is this thing, you know, there's this ideal that's sort of held up. Yeah. Yeah. That people feel constantly that they're failing to live up to and again I think this isn't really talked about very much, you know, and it is it comes in the minutiae Stuff, you know, and so I don't know if you have this but you know, I'm like the cutlery drawer You open the cutlery drawer, the cutlery drawer gets filled up with crap like little crumbs Dust and food debris and, you know, and like, I always, oh my god, it's disgusting I've been thinking about this.

Everyone has that. That's so reassuring. Yeah.

[00:20:41] Lucy Dearlove: When I moved out of my old flat, we had to hoover it out. I was like, this is so bad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've done that, yeah.

But yeah, that's so true, yeah. Surely

[00:20:52] Eli Davies: everyone, maybe, you know, maybe most people week, clear out the cutlery drawer on a weekly basis and get rid of all that, all of that, you know, debris.

And, and,

[00:21:02] Lucy Dearlove: no, they don't.

The thing that I keep coming back to in Eli's work that really strikes a chord with me, particularly how she writes around home building, is this idea of it being work. And sometimes it feels like work that we're not allowed to acknowledge or talk about as work, but it's also at the same time all consuming.

[00:21:25] Eli Davies: That thing of the work of it, you know, of moving into a new place, especially when you're starting from scratch, which is what I was doing back in 2018 when I started anew, you know, that relationship broke up. Um, I think that really isn't thought about enough, like how much, sort of, work, money, effort, thought, you know, it all requires.

And once you've done it, like, as Sandra Lindsay said, I mean, I did actually, when I was moving out of my last flat in Belfast, I was, I was, you know, unpacking things and, um, packing things up, wherever, and getting, emptying out my kitchen cupboards. And I, it felt like this, and I was using, trying to use up things from the freezer, use up, you know, things that I didn't, wasn't able to.

And that felt really sad, that's what, I got really emotional about that. And again, it wasn't, I only lived in that flat for a year, it wasn't somewhere that I had, had, you know, had particular recognition, you know, for me, my life. But the kitchen was... Somewhere that was clearly like, you know, important, you know, and I got really emotional that this has been a really important space, you know, here and um, and I'm turning it down and taking it apart and that is, yeah, that felt sad.

Another place I moved out was this really shitty place I was telling you about that,

you know, was not I got really emotional when I turned the fridge off. Like I got, I got, I got really tearful about it. I was like, what the hell is going on?

[00:23:17] Lucy Dearlove: The new kitchen is separate, square, with cabinets arranged in a U shape. The new kitchen is slightly bigger than the old kitchen. Two people could cook in here comfortably. Without it being a total nightmare. The new kitchen is all white. White gloss cabinets. White surfaces. White sink. White draining rack.

There's something that's nice about it in the sense that it feels good to have a blank slate. But I miss the orange kitchen. We've already stained the white surfaces, the white sink, the white draining rack with squeezed out tea bags, coffee grinds and drips and tinned tomato spills. I'd be lying if I said that we hadn't cursed someone else's choices in designing this kitchen.

Like the old one, there's no room for a table in here. The best thing about the new kitchen is that it has a window. I've become paralysed with possibility about what herbs I could grow on the ledge. And more importantly, The natural light means I can take photos of my food that actually look nice.

[00:24:21] Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: The house we're buying, we know the one we're buying, we're just waiting for everything to work out and do what it needs to do. One of the defining features of this house is, is the opposite of what was the defining feature that drew me into the last house. Which is to say that this house that we are buying does not have a kitchen.

Or it does. It has the room, it has the kitchen as a room, and it has an oven, and it has a sink. But the oven is a billion years old. The sink is absolutely disgusting. Everything about that kitchen, the moment we get in there, will have to be built again from scratch.

[00:25:04] Margaux Vialleron: We've now found somewhere else to rent, and there is a kitchen again, which I feel extremely lucky about, and privileged to have this again.

The one thing is, there is no door. There is no door, it's an open kitchen. It's, it's a wall really.

[00:25:20] Matthew Curtis: The kitchen hasn't been updated. It's like, it's a miner's cottage. The house has a cellar. It's a very small kitchen and it has a cooker, a gas cooker and I think it might be about 30 or 40 years old. You have to light the oven with a lighter by turning the gas on and sticking your hand in the back.

And, you know what, we've spent all our money, so we have to learn how to use it. Because, it'll be, you know, a few months or maybe a year or more before we can afford to replace it. Because we own it, we've painted it this dark olive green. So like the outside is coming in and that at once makes me feel like I want to spend time in there.

[00:26:01] Ruby Mason: My new kitchen is, yeah, it's the first time I've ever had my own kitchen. I mean, it's still a rented flat. In, in Germany and in Berlin where I live, it's pretty common for rented flats to not have kitchens in them. So even as a tenant. You fit the kitchen and like the cabinets and everything yourself when you move in, which might sound a bit strange from, from like a UK perspective, but on the flip side, tenancies are very secure here, so.

You usually sign a lease for like an unlimited amount of time and you can't, you can't really be evicted So you expect to stay kind of for many years and get your money's worth of your things So so my new kitchen is green, which I love and yeah, I'm still getting used to having my own kitchen. It feels luxurious and extravagant in a strange way.

All the fridge space and cupboard space.

[00:26:51] Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: The week before we moved out of our house, even though I'm still waiting, even for the mortgage to be sort of confirmed, I went to the estate agent and I asked if they would let me into the house that we're looking to buy. And I took a tape measure and I measured that kitchen and I have all of that written down so I can eventually start planning.

I don't know how I'm going to plan a kitchen. I mean, I know there's going to be tools online, but. I'm still in a space where I think the best way to do it is just to go on The Sims or something. The kitchen has a terracotta floor that is old and tatty and needs a lot of love, but I'm gonna give it that love.

And I'm excited to have a kitchen that is my own.

[00:27:34] Maria Agiomyrgiannaki: We moved into a flat in a new development in Walthamstow. So the kitchen is a big space, together with the living room and the dining room. It does feel a little bit silly, because we moved out of the old flat. Uh, because we had leak, we had rising damp. It was just really months on end of a nightmare situation with the landlord.

And the kitchen was kind of, walls were crumbling and everything, so. cupboards stinking of moulds and just, so this is why this feels, um, stupid because the new kitchen obviously none of that mould smell none of any of that but the old kitchen I do miss it. It feels like I had arranged it how I wanted it to be with the furniture and with the shelving and everything So And the new kitchen, it feels like this is it, and I have to adopt it, and I have to make it work, basically.

So, and I can't quite describe what I miss. It's quite visceral, I think. But I think I miss the kitchen like it was a person that I haven't seen in a long time. And I think there is, it's because of the emotional connection. of how much went, how much time, how much connection, how much, I don't know. The first meal we ate there in the new flat was some souvlaki that we ordered in.

So just after the, uh, the move. Yeah, just to share some food with the friends that helped us move. We ordered some local souvlaki.

[00:29:20] Margaux Vialleron: The first meal I made there is a big, big pot of orzo, which is also my favorite, orzo with some grated courgette. The trick is to have it one yellow and two greens, a bit of parmesan and some oat cream to make it very smushy, and that's also a great meal to share.

I think this kitchen is gonna be about sharing,

[00:29:39] Matthew Curtis: was unpacking everything. I got the frying pan outta the box and I fried an egg and I got a loaf of Warburtons and I didn't even do anything to the bread. Just a fresh loaf of very soft white bread. The plainest pillows bread. I fried an egg over easy in olive oil.

And I put that in the sandwich, oil splashing onto the bread, and then I got some daddy's ketchup, which is a bit more acidic than most of the ketchups, I don't know if you've compared ketchups, and I bought it because it was a pound cheaper than Heinz, and I'm like, oh yeah, that'll save me a quid. Anyway, fried egg sandwich.

on plain Warburton's white bread, toasty, specifically, with loads of daddy's ketchup on it. And that was the first thing I cooked in this kitchen surrounded by our lives in boxes. And, I don't know, there's something nice. It was like, it was a breakfast meal. I think that's a nice start to cooking in a house, like, okay, I've got gas coming out the hob, I'm gonna fry an egg.

[00:30:36] Ruby Mason: Yeah, I remember, I remember when I moved in and I was kind of still doing some DIY on the flat, my partner and I bought rye crackers and, cheddar cheese, which is relatively hard to find here, but we found some really nice mature cheddar cheese, a jar of, um, Spreewald pickles, basically gherkins that are like grown in the Spreewald, which is close to Berlin, a very iconic German, German thing, and had a lot of meals of those, like with those three components, crackers, cheese and, and pickles, which is very satisfying.

[00:31:08] Stephen Rötzsch Thomas: I don't know what I'm going to cook the first. The first time I get a chance to cook in there, the first time after I've put in an oven and put in counters and put in cupboards and put all my food and my billions of pans and stupid things. Once I've shipped in 150 cookbooks and put them in the bookshelves and next room over because they will not fit otherwise.

I'm fairly sure, whatever I am cooking, it won't be a cookbook, it might just be a risotto.

[00:31:46] Lucy Dearlove: The first meal we ate in the new flat wasn't when we cooked either. Around 5pm, Friends rang the doorbell. It was the first time we'd heard it, and came up with bags of KFC. We didn't have any dining chairs, so we sat on the sofa that we'd bought off the previous inhabitants. I hadn't unpacked the plates yet, so we ate drumsticks, wings and thighs out of Denby cereal bowls.

I'm several weeks into this new kitchen now, and I'm still finding my way around it, learning the moves. Even though I'm the one who unpacked, who drew the map of the new territory.

I don't feel settled as such, not yet, but I feel excited.

Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove. Thank you so much to Ruby. Margot, Stephen, Matt and Maria who generously contributed their stories of moving kitchens via voice notes and audio recordings. You can find links to all of them in the show notes and you can also read their contributions at greater length on the Lekker substack this week.

Also a huge thanks to Eli Davies who was kind enough to speak to me about her work around home building for this episode and whose contributions were just so thought provoking and interesting. I'm so excited to read. more of her work around this subject in the future, I'll link to some of her writing in the show notes.

You can also read a longer version of that conversation on the Lekker Substack 2 that'll be coming this week as well. I can't and shouldn't talk about kitchens without mentioning the entire series I did a couple of years ago about this very topic. Kitchens are very much still on my mind. You can go back and listen to that via the Lekker website.

Or you can find it in the feed on whatever podcast platform you listen to. There's also a print scene that I edited to go alongside that series with lots of writing and illustration and thinking around kitchens. It's been unavailable to buy for a little while while I've been moving, but I've just reactivated the big cartel, so you can order it there.

Link, as ever, is in the show notes.

A reminder that Lecker is listener supported. If you're in a position to donate regularly or one off, it is. Hugely appreciated and helps me cover costs and keep the podcast going. You can sign up via Substack, Patreon, or Apple Podcasts, and you get access to some bonus content. There'll be more subscriber episodes starting this month, so you can access them on all of those platforms.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions. And thanks so much to you, as always, for listening.