Chilling

Sundays are so short.

This one was even shorter, because we wasted over an hour of it sitting in bed having a House Meeting over coffee this morning.

The agenda for this was the Malfunctioning Fridge Freezer.

It is still staying frozen a bit in the top of it, although everything is slightly squishy to the touch. The fridge is alternating between not working at all and unexpectedly freezing the milk.

Mark said that we needed a new one.

I said that new fridges are expensive and wished to know why he couldn’t fix it.

He said that he couldn’t fix it because the problematic bit was some electronic gubbins which had ceased to respond correctly to its own instructions. He explained that he could try to fix it if I wished, but in between dismantling the whole thing, fathoming out the problem and ordering new electronic gubbins I might be more than a week with no cooling facility at all, and it might be even longer since he has already got two full time jobs to attend and the firewood and our vegetable garden to maintain.

He also pointed out that since we had purchased it second-hand on eBay for two hundred quid when Oliver was seven, we had probably had maximum use out of it.

I agreed, reluctantly, that perhaps a new one  might be becoming inevitable.

We have got a small stash of cash for such household emergencies, and so we had a look at the Currys website.

Here we discovered that a new one just like ours, which I like when it is working, would cost us one thousand five hundred pounds.

This is more than I paid for my taxi, and three times as much as our secret envelope full of emergency cash, so we thought perhaps we might not do that.

We pondered and investigated and considered and discussed.

In the end we discovered a website which sells fridges which people have bought from Currys and then returned.

There was one just like ours for four hundred quid.

It was brand new and perfectly functional, even with a guarantee, except for some enormous and hideous dents and scrapes in the door.

I was not surprised that the prospective purchaser returned it to Currys. If I had just paid a grand and a half for it and the delivery man had simply hurled it off the back of the van into my garden I would have returned it as well.

We examined the dents carefully.

Mark said that it was only the same thing as fixing the sort of taxi that your wife has backed into a post, and that probably they could be fixed with some car bodywork filler. He reminded me that I would probably want to cover it with gold vinyl anyway.

Five minutes and a credit card later we were the proud owners of a dented fridge freezer and eight metres of gold vinyl.

It is a beautiful fridge freezer. It is truly the state of modern fridge freezer art.

They are even going to deliver it next week, so we did not even need to consider hitching the trailer to the back of the camper van and turning up looking disreputable.

Mark said that he can make it work even better by cooling the compressor down by running water round it on its way out to the conservatory. We did not go into any further detail about this and I thought that possibly he might just forget if I don’t remind him.

This messed up the beginning of next week because I wanted to go on holiday for a day tomorrow, starting after work tonight actually, but we are going to have to spend a couple of days installing the new fridge freezer later on in the week. This means that Mark is going to have to go to work tomorrow instead.

He consoled me with an exciting suggestion.

Next week the Mystery Plays, I mean the real Mystery Plays, not some drivel produced by the Worshipful Guild of Vegan Butchers, are on in York.

He suggested that we went to see them.

It would not be expensive, because they are outside and you just go and stand about looking at them. They are on Wednesday, when we do not need to be at work, and I was absolutely as pleased as anything.

Lucy will be here, so she could come as well, and we could perhaps meet Nan and Grandad for lunch. We have not seen them for ages. Nan and Grandad, if you are reading this, I haven’t got round to ringing you up yet, but would you like a date at the Black Swan?

Lucy thought that she would like that and that she might also make a date to drink too much with her friend who lives in York.

I do not mind now about missing tomorrow’s holiday.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am about the Mystery Plays. One day I would like to go to Oberammergau to see the Passion Play there, and so it will be jolly good practice.

I am going to go away and look on their website.