Skip to main content

A fridge too far

Image
By

I had a lovely holiday - thanks for asking. No I didn’t being any rock back. But the de-stress started with an unscheduled defrost.

We were really looking forward to our break. A relaxing seven days of walking, eating cakes, drinking cappuccinos, eating cakes, mooching around shops and eating cakes. Did I mention the cakes?

A short hop to the Yorkshire Dales meant no middle-of-the-night alarm call to struggle through the dark and hang around at an airport. No “who’s got the passports?!” moments. No wondering why people are drinking at breakfast time whilst you’re looking at a pile of Toblerone.

We had coffee in bed, then after a leisurely shower I went downstairs for breakfast. Devouring my cereal, something seemed odd. The flakes and milk tasted fine, but something was... different. It was very quiet, too.

On putting the milk back in the fridge, the penny dropped. The fridge wasn’t fridgey any more. It was room temperature. As were the contents. The freezer section was still icy, but stuff close to the door succumbed to a tentative finger prod.

Mild panic ensued. Some bits could come on holiday with us in a cool box, but tough decisions lay ahead. The tatty old overflow freezer in the cellar was full, so an extended game of deciding what to keep based on value, volume and likelihood of food poisoning ensued.

The half dozen pots of partially consumed hummus, frozen on the “use by date”, made it to the bin eventually anyway. The homemade soup that we didn’t really like vanished down the sink with the help of a running hot tap. The unidentifiable creamy coloured stuff in an unmarked tub was an easy win. Reduced to clear bread cut to the soul with every slice destined for the wheelie bin.

A lightning quick decision was made on a new fridge-freezer from a local supplier, lined up to arrive the afternoon we got back. Off we went, deeply troubled that our bin might violently assault a passer-by who got too close.

Our 17 year old fridge-freezer, trusty, wheezy, rattly, keeper of cold stuff, had breathed it’s asthmatic last. We came back from holiday to an answering machine message saying our new one had been badly damaged in transit, and was three days later OK? Have you tried living without a fridge for 72 hours? There’s only so much you can do by rotating freezer-blocks in a plastic container in the cellar.

Eventually, the replacement arrived. An unfamiliar white obelisk – a silent, cold, sentinel watching over us and probably sneering at our choice of yoghurts and high chocolate-to-vegetables ratio. The door isn’t as deep, the light’s a cold blue not a warm yellow, and the shelves are different heights. My carefully honed ‘system’ has been ruined.

On the plus side, we’re not in hospital being treated for some gastrowotsical emergency. And I saved the tub of chocolate ice cream. But I already told you this. Didn’t you get the postcard?

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 5th of May 2017. The version used online retained the same title, but the print edition added "Taking things a..." in front, for some reason.

 My newspaper column ideas notebook contains hasty scribbles, some words and puns that I like, and in a lot of cases just a few brief sentences on a subject. Whilst many columns get written entirely from scratch on the spot, this was a notepad one that had been luring for a few weeks.

 When nothing comes to me in the couple of days of window I have to write it, I delve into the notebook to see what I've got. This was an easy one, as it needed no research. 

(CD A-Z: Mike Oldfield's "Light + Shade"... the rockier "Shade" disc.)  


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shouting in the social media mirror

By
It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...
Post a Comment
Read more

A fisful of change at the shops

By
A recent day out reminded me how much the retail experience has altered during my lifetime – and it’s not all good. I could stop typing this, and buy a fridge, in a matter of seconds. The shops are shut and it’s 9pm, but I could still place the order and arrange delivery. I haven’t got to wander round a white-goods retail emporium trying to work out which slightly different version of something that keeps my cider cold is better. It’ll be cheaper, too. But in amongst the convenience, endless choice and bargains, we’ve lost some of the personal, human, touches that used to make a trip to the shops something more than just a daily chore. Last weekend, we visited a local coastal town. Amongst the shops selling over-priced imported home accessories (who doesn’t need another roughly-hewn wooden heart, poorly painted and a bargain at £10?) was one that looked different. It’s window allowed you to see in, rather than being plastered with stick-on graphics and special offers calling ...
2 comments
Read more

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more