Whumpf!

I don't cook.

This should be understood from the outset. I have cooked in the past, but it's not a thing I do well or with any panache, and it's therefore not something I do for myself.
In the wonderful, bad old days when I was a student, our kitchen blew up on the third day, and I survived an entire year of college on delivery pizza and ice-cream bars.
Given my druthers, I'd live on stuff on toast and ice-cream or cereal.

But this lunchtime I wanted to do something that was non-toast-based. I dug out some small pizzas from our behemoth freezer. Then I approached the cooker. Seemed perfectly straightforward. Turn a dial, insert pizza, wait till cooked, remove.

I'm basically a caveman, but I figured I could cope with that. I turned on the over, cranked the dial, turned away to make myself a coffee, and heard a quiet "Whumpf" behind me.
I turned back, only to see a big, bright mushroom cloud reaching up to the top of the oven and rolling around the interior. I turned it off, pulled out the baking tray...my pizzas had been replaced by a couple of blackened, charred discs of carbonised dust. For a second, I thought about using them to do a moody black and white portrait of my wife for the office wall, but in the end I decided...
"Fuck it, it's food."

Or rather, of course, "eat it, it's food".

"You used the oven?"
The incredulity in d's voice bored on panic.
"Yeah...tell me, who fitted the thermonuclear device?"
"Oh that," she said. "Yeah, that can be tricky. Let me guess...you put the pizzas in the top part of the bottom over, rather than the bottom part of the top oven, right?"
"There's a top oven?" I asked.
"Yyyeah it's that thing that looks like a salamander."
"A lizard?"
"No, ya dink. A salamander...it's what you British weirdos call a grill."
"Oh, that. That's an oven too?"
"Yes. Look, you're missing the point..."
"Err yeah, top of the 'bottom' oven then..."
"Yyyyeah, thought so. For some reason the top of the bottom oven is about 3000 Kelvins hotter than the middle of the bottom oven. And for reasons I'm not entirely sure about, the bottom of the bottom oven is pretty close to Absolute Zero."
"Really?"
"Yeah...I think it probably exists in a slightly different space-time continuum or something."
I should never have let her watch the last season of Doctor Who.
"Is that right?" I asked. "So we've got a neutron bomb in the bottom oven. Any other kitchen secrets I should know? Does the toaster work by telepathy? Is the refrigerator bigger on the inside? If I turn on the food processor, will a tiny three dimensional princess pop up and go "Help me Tony-wan...?"
"This is why you don't cook, isn't it?"
"No dear, it really isn't..."

Another not-terribly-good day, Disappearing-wise. Combination of tight deadlines and...well, fundamental laziness, probably, but let's not underplay the importance of tight deadlines, dammit! May, just conceivably, bike later, one we've been hospital visiting and out for a meal with some family who are down from Esher to see my dad tonight.

Still got four days before I have to weigh again...Hmm...Something should be done...Whether it will or not rather depends on the deadlines getting looser. So this is me...buggering off back to do some more editing before visiting time. Catch ya tomorrow, fans and groupies!