10 June 2026

How to live without a fridge

It’s all fine – until summer comes

For weeks I have been tantalising you with promises that I would tell you about my broken fridge. But these have been an incident-rich few months, and I have simply not been able to squeeze it in. However, I now can. But I warn you: this is not a story for the faint-hearted.

To recap: on 1 March, I decided that the tiny freezer compartment of my fridge had become impossibly icebound. Those of you who have seen John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing will recall the frozen tomb from which an ancient space-borne evil is released: there was a similar vibe going on with my freezer. It was time to Do Something. So, for once, I did what a normal person would do: I defrosted it.

There are times when it is correct to do the normal thing, and this turned out to be not one of them. Because I need a strong drink to undertake most domestic chores, I waited until the evening to do this. By around 11pm I saw that most of the ice had either melted into the towel I had placed at the foot of the refrigerator, or was in a fit state to be pulled off the freezer walls by hand. I was rather proud of my handiwork. I got back to my laptop and carried on with whatever I’d been doing on it.

About an hour later, the laptop conked out. Damn and blast, I thought. I then noticed that the little green light by the power socket wasn’t on: it wasn’t charging. I’ll sort this out tomorrow, I thought, and went to bed. I then noticed that the bedside light wasn’t working. A quick check confirmed that no socket in the Hove-l was working. Checking the fuse box, I saw that one of the switches was in a position it should not be in – and it refused to return to where it should have been.

I will spare you the details of what happened next; the steep learning curve about household electronics; the calls to the landlord; the sobbing. To cut a long story short: the fridge is permanently on the fritz, and every time I replace the fuse in its plug and try to restart it, the flat’s electrics go again.

There are many things I have learned to live without over the years: bath mats, loo brushes, pepper mills, bowls, art on the walls, hope. (I actually have a bog brush now, because they cost something like £1 at Ikea. And I now have bowls, because some thoughtful person left a couple outside their flat: a good deal of my furniture and decor has been provided by people leaving their redundant stuff outside for others to collect.) But living without a fridge is quite a challenge. During much of this year, it hasn’t been too bad. The weather has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping things from going off, and the kitchen, in the winter, is the coldest room in the place. However, when the weather is warm, it becomes the hottest room, and this is where things get tricky. Cured and smoked meats are good; so, too, is a Mediterranean diet. Bread and butter can be tricky but with discipline one can tear through them before they go mouldy or rancid.

At this point you might be wondering whether I am mad or not. Reader, so am I. However, I am finding it very hard to face dealing with this problem. I am not going to tell you what I saw when I opened the fridge a couple of weeks after it went on the blink. The last time I did so (which was a couple of days ago) a small cloud of fruit flies emerged. They have mostly gone now but it is an experience I am not anxious to repeat. There are brown envelopes I have been keener to open. Remember that incredibly stupid scene from the fourth Indiana Jones film in which Harrison Ford survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a fridge? Let me put it like this: I’d take my chances with the nuclear explosion, thank you very much. (Not that my fridge is big enough to hide in, but that’s not the point I’m making.)

Oh, of course I’ll sort it out eventually. But when natural indolence meets depression, certain domestic duties can slide, and the last person to give the place a good tidy-up was, literally, psychotic. It is currently not presentable to anyone from the outside world. Maybe I want it that way, as an excuse not to socialise.

Then again, it does get me out of the place. Walks along the seafront are always invigorating, and while I might not want to bring anyone back here, I can still have a conversation with the people I meet. Brighton is a friendly place, and is good for things like that. The other day I had a very pleasant chat with a young man who was using an ingenious contraption to blow enormous bubbles on the beach; he had come all the way from Inverness, and refused to go back there because he couldn’t stand another Scottish winter.

Yesterday, in a grim mood, I decided to cheer myself up by having a plate of grilled garlic prawns and a glass of wine at the Regency. It was about 5pm and the place was pretty empty. “Your usual place, sir?” asked a waiter I had never seen before. So it has come to this.

[Further reading: I’m surrounded by coppers for the first time since my LSD arrest]