Reasons why Fran is having to learn new terms

Spouse has snapped his collarbone or, as he put it to the GP this morning, ‘I broke my clavichord.’

‘Your clavicle,’ she told him.

He studied Early Music at university as a young man which explains why he knows the word ‘clavichord’. But he’s a pensioner now which explains why he uses it to describe a body part.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I told him afterwards. ‘The GP probably tells people about the lovely clavicle music she’s just heard on Radio 3.’

He’s not completely off track, though. I looked up the word origins of ‘clavichord’ and ‘clavicle’ and they’re both derived from the Latin word clavicula meaning ‘key’. The clavicle is shaped vaguely like an old-fashioned key and the clavichord is a keyboard instrument.

Honestly, you learn something useless every day!

Talking about language, I am having to learn some new terms now that Spouse is temporarily one-armed and I have been forcibly appointed into some unfamiliar roles. Here are some of my new roles and what I am learning.

Under-gardener

Spouse is a keen and knowledgeable gardener. He has an allotment, so he currently needs help with it. I am to plants, however, what Dracula is to people who have run out of garlic. Still, I accompanied Spouse yesterday in an attempt to be helpful.

‘This is a bean plant,’ he explained to me. ‘This is a raspberry bush. These are apple trees.’

‘Whoa, with all the terms!’ I said to him, putting my hands up as though stopping traffic. ‘I thought you trained as a teacher once. Did you never cover pacing?’

Under-recycler and Under-bins-putter-outer

‘So, the grey bin goes out on Tuesdays,’ he said.

‘Okay.’

‘And the green bin on Thursdays every other week except for when there are five weeks in a month.’

‘Right.’

‘And the small green bin on Thursdays but not if it’s a Leap Year.’

‘Okay.’

‘And you empty the tiny green bin in the kitchen into the small green bin while reciting Psalm 23 and standing on one leg.’

‘Got it.’

‘You can recycle this plastic but not that plastic, that plastic or that plastic. This looks like plastic but is not plastic. This doesn’t look like plastic, but is.’

‘Sure.’

‘You can recycle this type of plastic.’

‘Good.’

‘Unless you once owned a cat called Norman or prefer muesli to Bran Flakes.’

Under-getter-of-the-Kenwood-Chef-off-the-high-shelf

Spouse makes bread using a mixing machine that used to belong to his mother. I’m not saying it’s old-fashioned but Mrs Noah used one while cooking for everyone on the Ark. I’ve never had dealings with it before.

It lives on a high shelf in the pantry.

‘I’ll need you to get the Kenwood Chef down for me,’ Spouse said.

‘I’ve always called it the mixer.’

‘It’s called a Kenwood Chef.’

‘Named after Ken Wood, the chef?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is there a Ken Wouldn’t Chef for people who don’t like cooking?’

‘Can you just get it down?’

‘You’re going to make bread with one arm in a sling?’

‘I can do everything else except get the machine.’

I looked up at the shelf, eyeing the distance between my hands and the Kenwood Chef in the way rugby players prepare to convert a try. ‘Is it heavy?’ I said.

‘Not very,’ he said, as I edged it inch by inch off the shelf, my arms at full stretch, to discover that the original Kenwood Chef was made of reinforced concrete - the kind that schools and other public buildings should be made from but aren’t.

‘Can you manage?’ Spouse said, doubt creeping into his voice as well it might. Picture a JCB about to fall onto the head of a newborn.

‘I’ll have to,’ I said, balancing the machine precariously. ‘There’s no going back from this point.’

There were a few seconds when I thought I was going to drop it and crush both my feet into the floor of the pantry so that they would have to be retrieved with a metal fish slice but, after a struggle, I gratefully deposited the Kenwood Chef onto the kitchen surface.

‘You do realise,’ I said, panting, ‘that I took quite a risk there. There were nearly two of us with broken clavichords.’

‘Clavicles,’ he said.

‘Whatever,’ I said, because people who’ve nearly died retrieving kitchen equipment - even retired English teachers - conclude that etymology can go stuff itself.

‘‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise you’d find it so difficult.’

‘If I had died,’ I added,' ‘you’d have wasted all that effort teaching me how to identify a green bean.’