Ante Refridgeratum

I have, over the years, been looked at askance by various members of my immediate family with regard to my creative ideas on house repair and maintenance. The latest example was last summer when I was intending to slop some paint on the window frames of the house in Liverpool. The frames (and windows) basically need replacing but I am not ready to do that just yet so I thought "slap some paint over the sills and frames just to keep them waterproof".

After delays due to rain and cold - I mean it was August - and urgent translation jobs, I finally got outside in the front... paintbrush in hand, tin of paint about to be levered open. When I looked more closely at the window sills... and gently prodded them I found that, under the buckled layers of old paint, the wood was all crumbly and rotten - eminently not paintable...

So I returned to the kitchen, amidst comments such as, "that was quick"..."another world record", to have a think. And having thunk I came up with a a solution, a temporary solution...
t e m p o r a r y ...!!

Packing tape!

Ok, it's brown and it doesn't look like paint... but it is water resistant and will (should/could/might just about) keep the rain out.

So I stuck strips of packing tape over the window sills... working from under to over... clinker style. Downstairs was ok... upstairs I had to throw the roll from one window and catch it at the other and then somehow stretch out the tape and stick it on.

This was intended to be a temporary solution, remember? Until I could get over again in November, say.

As it turned out I didn't get back until this week... and the packing tape is absolutely fine! It has majestically withstood a Liverpool winter of wind, rain, frost and snow!

I rest my case.

Anyway, I came back from ASDA on Monday with a few meagre supplies of milk, bacon, sausage etc for me on my own, bunged them in the fridge and switched it on. It was bloody freezing in the kitchen and I was sitting there looking at my breath condense as I breathed out and I said out loud, "it's like a bloody fridge in here!"

I remember when we got our first fridge back in the early seventies. For days previously I had been dreaming that we would be able to make ice cream!!

My dad and I were here on the morning it was delivered. We were both totally excited - like two schoolboys - well, I was a schoolboy and my dad was 64 but a schoolboy at heart. We put it in the kitchen, plugged it in, switched in on..."whirr, whirr", "oooooh!" And then we looked around for things to put in it. My mother went nuts when she came in cos we had put everything in it... milk and stuff, ok, but also flour and tins and rice and packets of custard powder... everything, all jammed in.

Anyway, back to the kitchen where a little light - not unlike that little light in a fridge door - was just going on in my head. "It's like a bloody fridge in here... so why have I got the fridge on in a fridge?"

Before we had a fridge we used to keep everything in the pantry, which I must admit has been quite forlorn since the early 70s, so I put all my supplies in there and it has been great.

Eat my carbon footprint, suckers!