There’s nothing like a letter from the accountant in Acomb to spur me into action.
Fortunately, one arrived this week. “Please let me have all the paperwork for your next tax calculation as soon as possible,” it said.
Well, that did it. It was just the prompt I needed to start excavating my fridge.
I remember this syndrome very well from the bad old days of University Revision Week. This always brought on a sudden desire to clean the insides of cupboards, sort out clothes for the charity shop, and generally do all those domestic things that unaccountably start to seem both urgent and interesting.
Happily, the accountant’s letter also coincided with one of those “August is a slow news month” reports claiming that your entire personality is embodied in your refrigerator (and I mean this symbolically, not as in “storing your annoying partner in the freezer”).
I’m just as keen on a bit of self-absorption as I am on procrastination, so this is an ideal moment to tackle said domestic appliance.
Having done so, I can say quite categorically that the news report is quite right. For my fridge is small and quite sleek on the outside, and a shrine to disorder on the inside.
The main thing it represents is all kinds of good intentions that will remain eternally unfulfilled.
Let’s take the good intention to use leftovers. I don’t mean the ones you do actually use, like a cold roast joint. I mean the really important ones that you absolutely can’t bring yourself to throw away at the time: the small bit of pasta and pesto that will be ideal for lunch tomorrow. Or the remainder of a tin of tuna, which will be useful for a sandwich. The last centimetre of a bag of salad. All of which you then either don’t quite fancy, or don’t eat because you’re nowhere near your fridge and its second-hand pasta and pesto at lunchtime. The tuna, for its part, will be discovered in a state of decrepitude some significant time later, lurking in a dish with a saucer as a lid. It may take a degree in Archaeology to work out what it was.
Then there’s the good intention only to eat fresh and healthy things, otherwise known as lugging a lot of root vegetables back from the market on a Saturday morning. Only nobody except me likes root vegetables, and even I struggle to eat an entire cauliflower at one sitting. This leads to the further good intention to make soup, which in turn leads to a decaying cauliflower being discovered in the salad tray a month later.
Then, of course, there’s the good intention to save money. Hence the collection of out-of-date Yellow Stickered items that can rest there for a while, making me feel all virtuous, before being thrown away.
Good intentions, however, don’t account for the four half-finished bottles of tomato ketchup, three jars of opened mayonnaise and an entire bottle-bank’s worth of ancient soy sauce, chutney, various types of mustard, gherkins, fish sauce (a teaspoon was used once, a year ago, in a failed attempt to follow a recipe), and Heinz Salad Cream (actually, it’s worth excavating a fridge to find that).
And I have no idea where a four-pack of low-fat yoghurts appeared from. As they expired three weeks ago, though, I can only imagine the bin will enjoy them.
Sadly, the freezer is no better. However, it does have the advantage of the chaos being largely out of sight and therefore out of mind.
Therein, though, lies the problem. Because a freezer makes it so easy for people like me to hold on to their hopeless good intentions more or less forever.
There was, for instance, the good intention to make my own marmalade back in January in a fit of domestic excitement following a trip to the greengrocer in Bishopthorpe Road. This intention is now represented by a large bag of frozen oranges. Somehow, the idea of standing over a hot pan of marmalade for hours in August is more than somewhat less than appealing.
Then there’s the whole idea of “batch cooking”. This is the polite term for accidentally making too much chilli/bolognese sauce/curry, bagging it up, and sticking it in the freezer. This would be fine, if you remembered to label it. It’s not so fine, though, when you promise your family spaghetti bolognese, and it turns out to be pasta with curry.
That, however, might be slightly more appealing than the endless small remainders of bread and stray peas that somehow slither underneath everything else.
Happily, though, there’s always a solution to the Freezer Problem if you’re a really stupid person (i.e. me). And that’s to accidentally unplug the freezer, thereby rendering its entire contents un-frozen in one single night. Which leaves you with no alternative but to throw everything away. Which in turn leaves you with a nice empty freezer that you can store things in again, until they in turn are thrown away too.
You know it makes sense.
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