I’m oven a nightmare!

And cakes, cup and loaf. And roast chicken. Oh, roast chicken... with garlic and tarragon and mega crispy skin and some high fat, fluffy, crispy, roast potatoes.

Today, ladies and gents, is the 140th day I have been without a cooker. No oven. No hob. No grill. Just a slow cooker and a two ring camping stove.

That means no bread. No roast anything. No creamy dauphinoise potatoes or lasagne, no Spanish omlettes without a grill to finish them under. No baked spuds. No... well, you get the picture.

I can’t really explain how traumatic this has been.

Food is such a massive part of my life that I’m usually thinking about what’s for tea before I’ve even made the morning coffee.

People know about this affliction to the extent that on a recent to trip to Edinburgh the friend we were visiting planned all our activities around where we were going to eat and drink.

And I know what you’re thinking.

If I’m such a foodie, surely I know enough recipes that don’t require an oven to manage for a measly 20 weeks. I mean, 140 days isn’t that long, is it?

The pitfalls of having no cooker 1 Being forced to use your slow cooker too often. I love my slow cooker (and cripes, it makes a good curry) but there’s an unmistakeable tang that all slow cooker food has, like really low quality vegetable stock, that gets a little wearing after a while.

Plus, you can never really tell how long things will take to cook. A typical slow cooker meal in our house starts off like this: me, chop, fill, switch on. Him: that’s never going to cook. Me: yes it will. Him: no it won’t. You do know you’re basically cooking over a light bulb, right?

2 Being forced to move the contents of your slow cooker to a pan on the camping stove when your boyfriend turns out to be right (not always, but sometimes) about the light bulb thing.

3 Running out of gas for said camping stove while your tea is still cooking, and having to make a 40-minute trip to the nearest camping gas shop before it can be concluded. (I try not to think of all the bacteria multiplying in said dinner during my manic drive. Best not to.) If someone can invent a way of telling me how many minutes of cooking are left in my gas bottle, I’m giving them a million pounds... or at least the plastic vuvuzela sitting on my desk.

4 Only having two rings on your camping stove, and they being cleverly placed so close together you can’t actually get a pan on each of them, forcing you to eat either pasta or a “one-pot meal”.

How many one-pot meals can you name?

Is the answer 140? Didn’t think so.

5 Having to eat a lot of things that are fried or barbecued. Particularly sausages. And halloumi.

The upsides? Having to eat a lot of things that are fried or barbecued. Particularly halloumi. God I love halloumi.

But by this time next week, we will have, if the Swedish gods of flat pack and a kitchen fitter called Colin see fit, a new kitchen.

A whole spanking new, not rusty or dirty, not leaky or cookerless, kitchen. Five gas rings and two ovens.

I hardly know what to do with the excitement.

Now all I have to do is decide what to cook first..

While I wrote this I was listening to Wimbledon. More precisely, to RFed getting his tennis balls handed to him by a Columbian.

I have nothing to say about that (well I do, but we haven't got all day), except to share with you this description of RFed sent to us by the lovely Jo Parry on Twitter: Federer, the man who looks like an Aardman animation version of Quentin Tarrantino.

He SO does.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward apparently has, on his desk in his office "if you knew you could not fail, what would you do?".

Smarter people than I have written about the hubris involved in drilling for oil three and half miles below sea level, 2,500ft deeper than the wreck of the Titanic, where there's no light, freezing temperatures and the pressure is so high you'd have died15.000ft feet up.

And smarter people than I have pointed out that if you fancied sticking a pin in a highly pressurised balloon full of oil in such a remote location, you'd have a plan, a properly worked out plan, for what happens when your balloon bursts and you're not controlling the flow any more.

But next time we pick up a free plastic bag from the supermarket to carry our plastic-wrapped, flown-in-by-air vegetables, maybe wearing polyester mix leggings or man-made leather shoes, and get in our cars to drive to home where the TV's on standby and the laptop's on so we don't lose the webpage of the airline we're using for your flight to Portugal this summer, remember this.

BP might be careless, unprepared, blase idiots. But we put them there.

What's happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and in other, less wealthy and so less reported places like the Niger delta, is done for us, in our name and with our blessing.

Whether you like it or not, we're all responsible.

And while we tut and shake our heads and plan our holidays, oil executives are working out where to drill next.