Just right – a poem about a cooking-pot

Image courtesy of The Old Design Shop, a vintage image treasury and one of my favourite image sources.*

When baby bear had left home
and then had had a pot,
it would’ve been, I like to think,
like the silver one I did adopt

from outside someone’s wooden gate
in the back roads of North London.
Either the owners had to relocate 
or make space for Christmas plunder.

Into my little pot, thrice daily go all things:
breakfast oats, reheated soup or split red lentil dhal, 
popping corn, or frozen veg like spinach, broccoli,
then pasta and basmati, in their single servings.

My just right pot has no lid,
a single handle, straight.
Burnt raisins catch in crevices,
but generally it’s great.

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The first winter I was in London, I picked up the most ‘just right’ sized cooking pot for a single diner outside someone’s gate. In all these London suburbs there are certain times of the month and year when residents chuck stuff. Someone once told me that they would regularly go skip hunting on the last Saturday of the month, and even took a guy on ‘skip hunting’ as a cheap date.

I have not taken anyone skip hunting as a cheap date (I’d rather visit an art exhibition in someone’s company), but I do have my own skip hunting-buddy experience. Through my volunteering at a local soup kitchen I befriended a guy who knew (probably still does) the best back alleys for skip treasures in affluent middle-class, North London suburbia. There are a couple of finds from that evening that I still put to good use today.

My little silver pot was not a skip find, though. It was simply there on the pavement, sparkling in the blue winter sunlight, simply inviting me to take it home. We have seen many breakfasts, soup lunches and reheated rice and bean/lentil or pasts dinners together. When those raisins or sultanas from my morning porridge catch, I have to scour out the burnt bits, which I do with love for my just right pot.
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* Visit the original image at The Old Design Shop here.
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Twitter: @BeadedQuill
Facebook: BeadedQuill
Books:
In the Ocean: a year of poetry
Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys
Shining in Brightness: Selected Poems, 1999 – 2012