Fifteen minutes later the aroma of burning oil wafted up the stairs. Followed by the crashing of my feet running down the stairs, along with some wailing, and gnashing of teeth. There in the middle of my beautiful pot, - a round dark brown circle, with smoke billowing out. Oh oh oh!!!!!
I grabbed it up with some oven-gloves, rushed it towards the patio doors to get it outside before the smoke alarm went off, set it down on the mat in order to open the patio doors, picked it up, and found a perfect oval melted bit in the middle of the mat, one blackened ragged section now hanging down from the bottom of my pot ...
At this point Dan came home. I hung my head and told him that something bad had happened, and that, no, the mat wasn't the bad part, and then, he saw the pot.
Silence. Yes, a disappointed look, but, a sympathetic one.
A few minutes later, Dan was to be found bending his head over the sink, scraping away at the inside of the pot, while I started cooking with another pan. I leaned over the sink to put some water in a saucepan for the peas. I reached over to twist the mixer tap over the pan, and caught Dan smack in the middle of the forehead with the tap. So hard that I heard it. Dan looked at me, dried off his hands, rubbed his head, and did not emit a sound. He did go out to the garage though and started sorting out his books...
I knew I should marry Dan when I was visiting him in the US, early days, and I slept at a friend's house, so I had to drive his car from the trailer park where he lived to that house. In the morning I was getting his car out of the driveway and I managed to reverse it into a ditch. I wasn't at all sure how he would react, back then, so I phoned him with some trepidation to tell him he now had a puncture and a stuck car. He was so calm and cheerful about the whole thing, with not one word of criticism of me - and I knew right then.
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