Some like it hot
Above: The new breed
This month is the first anniversary of the worst floods in Gloucestershire since, well, since Noah piped a couple of Cotswold sheep aboard the ark.
And yet, to bastardise the well-known cliché, every cloud has a cast-iron lining.
The waters that fell on the Cotswolds on July 26, 2007, may have cut adrift a thousand kitchen islands but they also caused an unprecedented boom in sales of the Cotswolds’ most potent post-war symbol - the Aga. For a flooded Aga is an ex-Aga. Once the water has penetrated the ovens, the insurance company will automatically write it off and replace it with a new model.
And so there has been an unprecedented rush on the enamel sarcophaguses that has led indirectly to a new must-have accessory for fashionable Gloucestershire - a remote control, or to give it its proper title an ‘Aga Intelligent Management System’ (AIMS), that comes free with the new electric version of the cooker. It is a portable gizmo that when pointed at the cast iron cooking kiln reduces its heat from sweltering to still quite hot.
I stumbled upon this useless bit of kit when, during the mini heat wave last month I went to a swanky dinner in Malmsbury.
I was making the usual complaints about the heat from my Aga in high summer when my host produced his flood replacement, 13-amp, three-door cooker, electronic AIMS remote and said ‘problem solved’.
“We keep cool in summer by using the AIMS to turn the Aga onto ‘slumber’ mode,” he said smugly. “We turn it back up when we want to cook. All the new electric Agas have got AIMS. Everybody’s got one.”
I was furious (and not just because my house hadn’t been flooded). An Aga remote control is an oxymoron. The point of an Aga is that like Marilyn Monroe and Tabasco sauce it is always hot. Just as Coronation Street’s Betty would never serve a quite warm hot pot and Jeremy Clarkson would not be seen dead in a not-very-hot hatchback, so the AGA doesn’t do lukewarm. It is either ‘on’ and like GCHQ it is powering away 24-hours a day, or it is ‘off’ and as cold as the wind at Cheltenham races.
For decades the Aga has been the rural interior’s equivalent of the Land Rover. It has been an all purpose, multi-function piece of machinery that cooked, ironed, dried, made the toast, heated the water and kept wet dogs and new born lambs warm. Now, like the 4x4, it has become a style item. It is no longer the farmhouse kitchen’s practical Series 11a Land Rover but rather a complicated shiny Range Rover Sport.
It is not just the electronic fob key that switches it on and off that rankles. It is also that nowadays it comes in designer colours and is endorsed by urban celebrities from Martin Clunes to Ulrika Johnson. Furthermore the brand has more logo-stamped accessories than Posh Spice, most of which is ordinary kitchenware stamped with the Aga logo and sold at extortionate prices. A bog-standard plain pottery teapot with the name of the stove written on its side, for example, is thirty quid.
But perhaps most depressingly of all is the fact that the cooker can now have cosmetic surgery. “Do you love your Aga but think that it could do with a face-lift,” says the company’s latest glossy bumf. “A little TLC will work wonders. Through our new-age cosmetic surgery service, we can make your existing Aga look as good as new.”
A four-oven Aga front, for instance, is £2500 (about the price of a buttock lift). A new pair of stainless steel covers for the hob tops is £650 (considerable cheaper than a breast implant but unlikely to receive as many compliments) while a paint job to touch up those unsightly scratches is around £500 (pretty much the same as a chemical peel to remove a scar).
Reinforcing this message of the cooker as a mechanical Joan Rivers wishing to recover its lost youth is the company’s Mills & Boon brochure that has ‘love’ written on its cover and a raft of purple prose inside declaring “an Aga is the only item in the kitchen that’s genuinely loved, for a lifetime.”
This anthropomorphising of a stove is about as far from rural living as it is possible to be. There is nothing red in tooth and claw about a Pistachio-coloured stove.
I for one am glad that my Aga wasn’t flooded and a new one foisted upon me. Like a Barbour, a flat hat, a dry-stone wall and Clarissa Dickson, an Aga should be left to grow old gracefully. It, like the countryside it serves, is better weather-worn and unadorned rather that reinvented with a gizmo, vulgar glaze and a goodnight kiss.