The Court of the Orange Peeler

It was an ordinary chair, beside the back door, tucked into a standard table in a standard kitchen. 

Its occupant was anything but ordinary, however: a tall, stooped, white bearded man, concentrating intensely on his breakfast routine. 

The room brimmed with the smell of citrus and half a kilo of honey poured onto his gloop of porridge, a concoction which I assumed to be grandfatherly smells, but which turned out to simply be the smell of my own Grandfather. He slurped up the porridge from his spoon, more smoothie than porridge. Once finished, he would hold an orange within his strong, rugged hands, hands that fishermen could envy, and peel it above his emptied porridge bowl with a little spoon, whittling away at the skin like a carpenter, dosing the room in a film of juice. 

As I watched him one morning, full to the brim with gloopy oats, I realised I had been here in this room on five consecutive days at various times of day without realising I had been there at all. This sort of thing happened a lot and I did not know why. I did not live near my grandparents, did not partake in any business nearby and did not pay for any accommodation there. And yet, I appeared to spend a huge amount of time there, often accidentally. 

There was a strange, intriguing draw I felt towards my grandparents and their home; the walls cluttered with wine memes; the spare room with a sunburst on the ceiling; the random detritus which filled the rooms; their bickering; their infuriatingly different views to my own. As morning pierced through through the kitchen windows we would enter into fiery debates over our differences in politics, arguments broken only by the shared observance of a blackbird bouncing over the dewy lawn. 

The TV would come on in the evening, an ancient, minute box, with a screen smaller than the magnets littering the fridge beside it. It sat as far as possible from the orange peeler. He would sit and squint at ‘80s sitcoms, his hands clasped over his stomach, a teapot playing host to several rounds of tea with a shockingly overused teabag. 

We would watch the television silently for a few minutes and then, Inevitably, he would look over at me and ask about college, put down his mug, and begin a monologue. 

“You see, Jonathan, computers are really the future. Give it five or ten years and everyone will be working in computers. Won’t be a human left in the place. But you never really know what will happen in a few years, I mean one of my friends is a doctor and his son had a really horrific farming accident. Terrible. You really never know. Desperate. Did you ever meet my friend, the ecologist? He’s a fountain of knowledge, knows everything there is to know. He took a group of us out to Ireland’s Eye. Amazing place. Loads of different birds. But you see, you need versatility for life. You really should have stuck with the higher level maths you know. Maybe you should be an engineer?” 

I rarely felt the need to debate much of this, I was content to let his mind take me on this rollercoaster of advice, existential threats and career paths I will never follow. There was a kind of music to his thought process which I found entrancing. I’d sit back, listen and find ways to interject my own stories into the conversation, warmed by tea, mince pies and the gurgling, canned laughter which emanated from the TV every once in a while. 

The TV was replaced eventually and the Orange Peeler suddenly found himself with 10,000 different channels on a respectable screen, which he perused with fascination. French news, blatant propaganda channels, and Japanese weather stations all became regular features. The chair got new arms that slid into the table like a domestic transformer. An iPad was placed permanently on the table, permanently charged, as he adapted to new technologies, regularly swindled by email spam. 

But while technology grew, the orange peeler stiffened. Simple things like getting out of his chair became mammoth undertakings. His already-slow walk slowed to a shuffle. But they were never treated like problems, merely challenges he rose to meet with stubborn defiance. There were no complaints, just grim acceptance that he would have to work harder, even when he surrendered his love of driving, or when he was forced to give up oranges because they messed with his stomach. There were no complaints even when he lay bedridden, sweating beneath 10 blankets, convinced that he could cure his Spinal Stenosis, and anything else, with heat. There were no complaints even when all he had left were his Andre Rieiu CDs that we listened to on repeat, playing Orchestral covers of all the famous love songs. There were no complaints as his strength receded like the tide, at a pace faster than he’d ever walked. 

The strong, rugged hands that once peeled oranges, that were made for the sea, were losing their strength. They had once grasped a ship's rail beside my own, smaller hands, as we smashed through the waves, covered in sea spray, deafened by the wind and far more elated than my family who rolled around the cabin, queasy. Now, they grasped a bed rail as he pushed and pushed in an effort to move his paralysed body. There was no deafening storm, no turbulent waves, just silence and a distinct lack of movement in his body. 

One burst of sunlight through the shutters early one still morning and any remaining strength that had clung on to listen to Only Love exhaled and vanished, stealing the breath of a man who had inspired me so much, a man of daft ideas and adventures, a man of deep kindness and a wide smile. 

 For me, the kitchen was a ruin, the chair was empty, lacking something great which was there and then wasn’t. The iPad was faithfully kept charged but never used. The TV was switched to quiz shows which blared through the lonely, orange-less days of the pandemic. It was a place I tried not to be alone in, a place that I felt was dead.

I still seem to spend an awful lot of time in my grandparents' neighbourhood but it makes more sense now, for I live there. The spare room with the sunbursts on the ceiling is now littered with my own detritus. The kitchen smells of cumin-induced curry for the first time in my life. The honey is used more sparingly but the porridge is still gloopy. The court of the Orange Peeler is no longer empty, it holds four students and an OAP. It's a place where dinners are laughed down with friends, where cups of tea sort life’s problems, where breakfast is filled with intergenerational disagreements on domestic life, broken only by the shared observance of a blackbird bouncing over the dewy lawn.