Me and The Hubster both get Mondays off. When each one rolls around, it’s just like Christmas at Marital HQ. But not that exciting beginning bit of Christmas where little baby Jesus pops out to the delight of rapturous livestock, and you sing along with Bing while someone cracks a frosty bottle of champers and you unwrap granny’s old baubles together. It isn’t Noel’s joyous front part at all.
Except for one jolly time when we dressed Bunster in a reindeer cardigan, our days off resemble the arse-end of Yule; that bit from about midday where you gorge yourself into a food coma and doze in and out of A CSI Xmas: The Musical. I prefer Mother’s Little Helpers to the ones that Santa has, so like clockwork after the inevitable post-prandial spat we go our separate ways. I hit the sack with my Ikea app, a Xanax and a glass of warm milk. Hubster and his work-shy mates get on the turps down the median strip and bet on shit that only drunk Khmer men care about. God’s own papoose would be spinning in his manger.
So lately I’ve been trying to keep Hubster off the toddies and me off the dolls both at the same time. It’s why I thought fridge shopping this past Monday would keep us, for another seven days at least, safely behind the handrails on that slippery slope to mutually enabled destruction.
Other people might think six hours trawling CharmingVille’s myriad home appliance emporia in the company of a deaf, geographically challenged tuk tuk guy might actually drive one to self-medicate. But I’m quite particular about my white goods. For a start, they’re better actually white. From bitter experience as an OCD surface wiper with a penchant for sleep-eating, I know that an all-night, fridge-side salami bender leaves more fingerprints on stainless steel than Horatio Caine’s had hot dinners.
So 8am Monday and we’re holding hands in the back of the tuk tuk, chipper as all get out and so far intoxicant-free. I got plastic and a list of simple features we want in our new cool housemate.
1. White
2. The freezer part sensibly on the bottom
3. About head height
4. Icemaker preferred, but not a deal breaker
Like container loads of Korean fabric featuring the stylised beaver logo of a defunct Seoul maternity hospital (I’m not lying about this) and accident cars with Montana plates or ‘Whars Mah Boomstick’ decals, Bodes gets a lot of stuff nobody else wants.
We can add grey fridges to that list. In the rest of a world gone cray cray for colour, stainless, gunmetal, charcoal, dust and dove are so yesterday. If you fancy a magenta fridge or an avocado fridge or a black fridge or god forbid a white one, you can just snap your fingers and it gets wheeled right in by Matthew McConaughey in short shorts, apparently.
On the other hand, if you lay all the grey fridges in CharmingVille end to end, they would reach from Wat Phnom to the North Pole and back. There are so many that everyone could have his or her own choice of a personal plungepool or a Doctor Fish place. We could bring back the water festival with a monochromatic armada of tonally understated Panasonic frost-free inverters.
Most of them are cheap plastic that may or may not look like stainless steel. Some of them have two doors and TVs and ice makers and drink dispensers and mirrors and biometrics. With the really fancy ones you can ring it up on your way home and get it to tell your microwave to heat up that bit of pasta bake for dinner. I don’t give a shit. None of them are white, head height and with the freezer part sensibly at the bottom.
Except for one. On the verge of giving up and day drinking at Cat House, we found it upstairs in Sorya. It was exactly what we wanted, but covered in dings and scratches like it’d been in a fight. You never know what goes on in these places after everyone goes home. We made a loud and detailed inspection and soon attracted a crowd of dull-eyed shop assistants. I argy-bargied with the alpha dolt about the utter futility of a warranty, given its condition and all. After minutes of making stuff up that he knew that I knew even he wasn’t convinced about, he grinned and pointed to all the other fridges. “See, madame,” he explained. “All of them are broken, so that’s OK then.” It was true. They were all a bit fucked up, scratched and dented from careless handling and/or after-dark appliance fight club, but they’d most likely work OK given a bit of care and attention. Like the crappiest presents under the tree, they might fall apart next week, but for now let’s just take one Happy Monday a day at a time.