If it’s not one thing, it’s another: on the same day our four-year-old stops wetting his bed, one of the cats develops cystitis and commences spraying the duvets. Having identified the culprit (and apologising to our other cat) my wife crams one large unwilling moggy into one small box and is about to depart to the Harmsworth, leaving me to “work” in peace, when she remembers something:
“Oh – I just heard on ‘5 Live’ that apparently our fridge may explode.”
After wifey’s departed with her yowling package to the bus-stop I Google – not because I don’t believe her, but because I’ve never been 100% sure about Nicky Campbell. To my annoyance, that naked wrestler of burglars (Nicky Campbell, I mean, not my wife) is right: there’s a time-bomb beside the dishwasher.
Apparently daft enough to have purchased a Beko manufactured between 2000 and 2006 is at risk: there have been some twenty “incidents”, and one fatality, in London alone since 2008. (Why does living in London make us more at risk, does the tap water that makes our ice cubes contain hydrogen?)
Life, I feel, is hard enough without the likelihood that at any minute one’s fridge-freezer is about to engulf you in a ball of noxious flames. I work out that we bought the Beko in 2002, and as I contemplate the amount of food, booze and post-Vindaloo loo roll we’ve shovelled into its uncomplaining gob without a backward glance I wonder if this is a pathetic cry for attention from a nine-year-old: I even feel guilty, as if we’ve been taking the workhorse of the kitchen for granted, and if we were to be incinerated on the spot I suppose the insurance company would say it was our own fault.
As I wait impatiently to be connected to Beko’s service department it occurs to me with a heavy heart that given a choice between tackling a conflagrating fridge and attempting to organise - and wait in for - a visit by a fridge-freezer engineer and all that entails, I think I’d sooner fight the flames...
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