End of the fridge

We come home from being Tudors and the fridge has disappeared. I discover this when I try to put away some cheese. Dig says it is not stolen, but swapped for a freezer. He says that last week he went to John Lewis, and while me and the junior Grits were all cavorting around on Tudor lawns the delivery men arrived and did the swap. They took the fridge, and left us with the freezer. This is a relief.

Me and Dig don't actually get the chance to talk much. When we need to talk about things like why the accounts haven't been filed since 2004, we try to sneak to the office next door. However, the office has become a site of struggle since May thanks to the nesting blue tits, and the constant stream of children in and out to see daddy blue tit fetch mealy worms for the babies. Thus, just about every conversation me and Dig try to snatch about important things like accounts and fridges is constantly interrupted.

Actually, as an aside, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have been interrupting every conversation since February 2000, at first with sustained wahahwhahaha or snuffly noises, and now with rubbish about why horses need swimming lesssons and who's stolen the tiara and who has thumped whom and why nothing's fair.

Anyway, between Squirrel's demands to go on a bike ride, Tiger's complaint that it's not Friday, and Shark demanding her tiara back, I gather from Dig that last week he bought a freezer because he was unable to bear the fridge any longer, and feared his reputation if Ermintrude photographed the inside and stuck it up on an au pair website with the caption, 'This is what you're in for'.

Now it is difficult to describe the inside of the fridge, and I fully agree that the best way to get it discreetly removed is to buy something else from John Lewis because they take the old one away. We have another fridge in the office which is disgusting because it's never cleaned, but it is not a patch on the one that's just gone.

The problem started when Dig bought a washing machine, so I'll blame him for the state of the fridge. The front of the washing machine bows out and, being adjacent to the fridge, prevented the fridge door from opening properly. At first I threw a dishcloth in there to mop up the spilled orange juice, but I couldn't reach the cheese crumbs, nor the upturned jar of moulding peanut sauce, nor the spreading oily layer from the green pesto jar, nor the toffee someone put in there and which glued itself to the shelving. The whole interior started to resemble some sort of industrial waste site: the orange juice gradually turning brown; green stains dribbling in sticky lines down the insides; crusty layers of unreachable vegetable off-cuts frostily gluing themselves to unfathomable parts. The soil, Hama beads and snowman's head didn't help. In fact, after a few months, there was no clean patch of white plastic left at all.

Then last week the worst happened. And for Dig, the final straw. A whole open carton of Tesco tomato passata got pushed in there and knocked against the back wall. It exploded. Now I'm not sure what the inside of Idi Amin's fridge looked like, but I bet it was pretty gruesome. Well, our fridge looked like that. Stick a cabbage head in there, with the tomato sauce sprayed all around and the cheese deposits growing underneath with bits of dead carrot sticking out of them like finger ends, and you have a pretty good idea about our fridge.

So the fridge is gone, and a freezer is in its place. Not plugged in, mind, because that would be pointless. Because next comes the difficult part. Dig argues that he's decided we need a fridge in the kitchen after all, and not a freezer. There is nowhere to put butter except for the fridge in the office, and that's a long walk for some butter. So he says we must take out the old fridge from the office, clean it up, and swap it for the new freezer, thus making it pointless using the freezer, because it will soon move.

There's only one problem to this plan. To get the fridge out of the office, and to get the freezer in we would need to clear a pathway.

I will leave the office to your imagination. Suffice to say the last time a vacuum cleaner was in there was 1998. I haven't actually seen the carpet since 2001. Punching a hole in the wall and exchanging the fridge and freezer through that seems a simpler option than suggesting to Dig we have an office tidy up.

Or we could just live with an unplugged freezer in the kitchen. And accept that this was the price we had to pay for getting rid of Idi's fridge.

The fridge

The fridge is disgusting. I can barely describe it. So imagine this scenario.

Eighteen months ago the washing machine broke down. Dig went off and bought a new one and within a couple of weeks it was installed and working. Relatively problem-free for the inhabitants of The Pile, you might think.

There was just one problem. The front of the washing machine bows out, like a big curved letter C. Why it does this I do not know. It just does. But the consequence of the washing machine with a front shaped like a letter C is that we cannot open the fridge door. The fridge is adjacent to the washing machine; we cannot put it anywhere else because it is a specially long fridge and doesn't fit anywhere else. And for the last eighteen months we've not been able to open the door. Well, to be specific, we can open the fridge door to about a 30 degree angle; just enough to slip a hand in and out with a litre of milk.

Now, have you or your children ever put anything in the fridge, then knocked it over, and thought, 'Dash! I've just knocked over the yoghurt/ milk/ grated cheese/ orange juice/ pink sugar mice/ Hama beads/ pile of soil that mother is going to have a fit about when she finds it/ the bowl of soup that I thought I might eat later/ the tinned tomatoes that I opened on auto-cook and couldn't face/ half-bot of wine/ a snowman's head from the freezer/ the rest of the pasta that one day I might make into pasta salad/ clay fish/ etc etc?

In any normal fridge, of course you can spill it, curse, scoop out the contents and clean it up, promising to be more careful next time.

Well in this house, when any of the above gets knocked over in the fridge, there's nothing we can do about it because we can't open the door beyond a 30 degree angle. I can throw in some dishclothes to mop up the orange juice and soup, and I can scoop out a bit of the soil, but that's about it. I simply can't get in there to clean it all up. So it stays.

Now after childbirth I can take some disgusting sights, but the inside of our fridge isn't one of them.

The slight problem is that we are about to be exposed on this one. We have a visitor coming to stay on Saturday until Monday. This is Sasha, who is flying in from Germany to meet the children and decide whether she would like to be an au pair with us during August. And what if she opens the fridge? This would be a disaster. Dig has a reputation to maintain. What if she photographs the inside of the fridge and posts the horrific sight up on MySpace, or worse, provides a narration and sets up a video on YouTube? The national press would be alerted to Dig's fridge. I would be prosecuted. The children would go into care. All would be lost.

So today I have grabbed Tiger by the arm and marched her off to John Lewis to buy a fridge. Dig assured me you could go in, say 'I'll have that one' and they pop it round the next day.

Only it doesn't happen like that, Dig. Oh no, not at all. They pop it round in seven days time. Seven days. Sasha will have been and gone. She'll have her photo/video safe in her mobile phone and she'll be dialling the Daily Mail on Monday morning demanding counselling and compensation. So let's hope she's vegan, hates milk or never expresses interest in the fridge.

I could chain and padlock it, which will look normal, of course. Or I could stand in front of it for 48 hours shouting out 'Don't worry Sasha! I'll get the milk!' Or we could just let her get some milk for her cup of tea, and we pretend everything's normal and hope we get away with it.

Oh dear, oh dear. On the fridge front, all is lost.