The Refridgerator

Christmas a couple of years ago and my parents, who live in Betty’s Bay, (about an hour and a half out of Cape Town) had been working hard to get us up there over Christmas and New Year.
Well actually in October they were working hard at getting us up there, but by the beginning of December they were back peddling a bit.
Parents are brilliant like that. They dress everything for your benefit.
Once the reality of having two adults, three grandchildren, a forth “other” child, and two dogs, to share their two bedroom cottage had sunk in, the phone calls started.

“My boy, we thought you chaps would be much happier in your own place so we have rented the next door house from the neighbours. Now you can be completely independent and do your own thing.”

In fact the plan had been to dump all the kids and the dog with them, under the guise of grandparent bonding and shut ourselves up in one of the rooms to read and sleep and rest. Being independent in a separate house with all my children and pets was moving too far from the plan for our liking.

So it was that when we arrived there on Christmas day we were booked into the cottage next door which we had kindly been given the use of by the elderly neighbours. After a glass or three of welcoming of champagne had blotted out most of the memory of the kids screaming on the trip out, my wife and I started to carry our bags and all the Christmas gifts, from the car into the neighbours rented cottage.

But here’s the thing. In the kitchen of this cottage, was dilapidated fridge, with the remnants of a set of fridge magnets strewn across the front of it. You know. The ones with the words where you are inspired to write poetry and flowery prose. Except this set is so decrepit it only has about a tenth of the words.

Temptation is too hard to resist. Champagne has stirred my creative juices. I do what anybody under the circumstances would have done. I open the batting with a quick, crisp single, a clean and gentle “your crack smells like fish”
Not too bad with the words I had to choose from. Creative and clever.

As I pass my wife (who I love) on the way to the car for more bags I smile and proudly tell her to check out the fridge poetry.

Now my wife is amazing, and out of respect to her I won’t tell you what she wrote. Suffice to say she upped the stakes and gave me a very proud grin when she passed me on her next trip to the car.

Things deteriorated from there. Eventually we were both in stitches and giggling like teenagers. I ended off with a magnificent eight or nine word sentence that included the words “dark, hole, moist, smell and a few others”
It was actually not as smutty as it sounds. And I was (disturbingly) proud of how few words were left and how much sense the sentences actually made. (Writing this I have no idea where the children were. Certainly the eldest would have learnt to read by then. In the interests of Child Welfare let me state that the magnets were on the top door. Out of reach and out of sight)

Sadly the holiday week-end then took a bit of a dive. The next afternoon, (seriously and sadly) we got a call that my wife’s Gran had passed away. We decided that she would head back to town immediately, and that it would be better for the kids if I would follow the next day when I had got the kids settled down and the car packed up.
The next few days were obviously filled with the funeral and dealing with the sadness of it all.

And then, almost exactly 10 days later. It whacked me in the face. Shitsake!
The fridge. The magnets. The smut. The neighbours.
Shitsake.
In all the drama of getting back I had completely forgotten to clear the fridge.
It quite literally had the worst, most creatively disgusting smut you can imagine. It was funny to us. But we hadn’t planned for anybody else to see it.

A quick emergency call to my father (ex Michael House and all)
“Hey dad”
“Hi my boy”
“Um, tell me, have the neighbours been back to use the house?”
Fingers crossed. Thumbs held.
“Yes, they are there now, they came back about three days ago”
Shitsake.
“Listen, (I explain to him what we had done), you have to get over there and get it off the fridge”
(The disappointment in his voice. That his son. His very own son had allowed himself to be led astray like that.”
“Too late” he says. The elderly wife has already been over and she had obviously seen it. He just hadn’t known what she was on about. But he definitely remembered her using “pornography” and “fridge” in the same sentence. And they are a very Afrikaans couple and very conservative.
He was so embarrassed for me. He said he apologised a few days later and got a very strained smile out of them.

It wasn’t one of our most defining moments.
And of course last Christmas we got given fridge magnets by half the family.