Fridge Magnet Panacea

March 15, 2009 dinglesp 25 comments

I’ve got this somewhat sad hobby of collecting fridge magnets.

I don’t really know how it started, well, I do actually. Sometimes I’d find myself in an airport in some remote country (like Japan or the US) waiting for the plane, with just a few Yen / dollars / ringgits / drakma left over from the trip and thinking “well, I can’t see myself coming back here again, I should get rid of this”. Invariably fridge magnets are the cheapest thing in the airport and no matter what you buy you can normally fit a fridge magnet in there somewhere to completely spend up (and then invariably find yourself making a return trip within the month).

So, anyway I’d amassed a collection of 15 or so fridge magnets from places like Vietnam, Japan, etc etc over about three years.

The problem is that H didn’t really get the fridge magnet thing, she thought it was weird, even a waste of money. “But what are they FOR???”. I had to explain it all to her, about how the fridge was bringing coldness into our lives, how miserable it looked in the corner of the kitchen sitting awkwardly between the door and the in-built kitchen units with no real place to fit in, a massive, quietly humming, depressing lump of cold grey steel. Then I explained how the fridge magnets add colour to the fridge, every time I bring one home it adds a little extra happiness to the kitchen, “imagine how it will look in a years time” I said “when there are an extra 5 or 10 magnets on there” I said, “the fridge will be a little temple of joy”.

This excited H, unfortunately she’s not known for her patience.

So the other day a large box arrived from Taobao, H, near fever point with excitement, rushed it into the kitchen giving me strict instructions not to leave the sofa to help her with whatever it was (has she not been paying attention for the last nine months???). 20 minutes to half an hour later, she came back, grinning like a Cheshire cat and telling me I could go into the kitchen now. Well, I didn’t move at first, I was watching TV as it happens, but after she’d threatened me somewhat I sauntered in, to see this: