The important news to update y'all with is that I HAVE A WORKING FRIDGE.

After two weeks of faffing about wondering whether they'll fix it or buy a new one, then faffing about to get a thermostat, Mr Fridge Engineer turned up yesterday afternoon, and immediately ascertained that it was nothing to do with the thermostat but was a result of a long-term slow gas leakage.

[I sympathize with the fridge on this one. I find these days I'm very prone to gas leakage...]

One bottle of whatever-it-is-gas later, and my fridge is as cool as [insert your own cultural definition of "cool" here - my "cool" has never been "cool" except to me since about 1989].

Finally! I have cheese on demand, I have butter to put on toast, and I have fresh pasta just waiting on my every command.

Although I find shouting at tagliatelle less effective than immersing it in boiling water.

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The other big house news is that again I've passed the twice-yearly inspection, thanks to Sarah B and Keelan's help in getting it up to their professional standards rather than my amateur-bloke "oh, it'll do" shabbiness.

[Not that the landlord's agent could resist a few sly digs; for example, "I see the book pile has grown again." Yes, not that it's any frogging business of yours, madam.]

Sarah, Keelan and Luce have offered to provide a monthly clean-out, which – cash permitting – I may well take up. The only reservation I have about this is a class one; since when did I ever get high enough up the ladder that I employ domestic staff?*

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At the minute I am working my way through Doctor Who – The Creature From The Pit. A Fourth Doctor / Romana II story, long held in fan opinion as one of the "fail" serials as DW began its long slow decline. Bollocks to fan opinion – it's rather good, so long as you ignore the huge big green blob with the huge big green penis that Tom Baker tries to talk into at one point.

At least, I think he's trying to talk into it…

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* outside of consensual BDSM domestic/relationship scenarios. These, nor uniforms, will not be a service these women provide. [Damn.]
** images courtesy of shillpages

"Does the paranormal exist? I've noticed there's a definite area of my kitchen that's several degrees colder than the rest of the room. …I called an exorcist, but he said it was just my fridge." [Paul Merton]

The overarching topic of the moment is the broken fridge. After a couple of, how shall I put this, hurried visitations to Mr. Khazi – neither prompted by any of the usual foods which irritate my irritables – I wondered whether there may have been other causes.

Putting two thermometers into the fridge [just in case one wasn't calibrated - what, me, paranoid?] and leaving them there for several hours produced a reading of 10C [50f], when it should be at most 5C [41f].

I turned the knob up to full. Still 10C.

I switched the fridge off, defrosted it fully [which produced a lot of this entry's title], cleaned all the gunk out from underneath, switched it back on, and waited 24 hours for it to get back to working temperature. Which turned out to be 10C.

The fridge is part of the supplied "fixtures" of the flat, so I phoned my landlord's representatives. They sent round Aaron, the local electrician. He took one look, said "yeah, it's buggered, cheaper to get a new one than fix the thermostat" then went away.

Unfortunately here the story has been interrupted by the three-day holiday weekend, so I'm spending it devoid of refrigerated food content. Cue tin cans of everything.

Add to that the problem that come Tuesday it's not just a case of them ordering a new fridge to be delivered to my doorstep – it's an "integrated" fridge, part of a fitted kitchen; it has to be hard-wired in by Aaron – I wouldn't be allowed to touch it even if I wanted to.

So it looks like it may be a few days before I'm able to have a cheese sandwich without having to throw away the 90% of it I won't use afterwards. Okay, with the shops in my little town, the cafe, and some good friends, this is not exactly a disaster – it's totally copeable. It's just a right royal pain in the 'arris, that's all.

Although less of a pain in the 'arris than eating food that's been kept slightly warm for several days.

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Advance notice/warning that there's a new naughty story to be released, which is just getting its second proofread, hopefully as I type. Watch this space.

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Other things running round my brain this Saturday night:

* Not watching the Eurovision Song Contest. When it used to be one crap singing contest a year, it was something special, worth both loving and taking the piss out of. Now we have six sodding thousand "talent contests" on telly, from X-Factor to Britain's Got Embarrassing to Dorothy to Who's The Best At Pretending To Be Bea Arthur On LSD [note: yes, I made that one up, but I've copyrighted it so no nicking the idea, Sky One]. Why celebrate the "bad" when the bad has become the norm?

* Dinner with someone bitchenly amazing, this Thursday. If the sodding fridge saga doesn't intervene.

* Is that really Nicola Bryant, the woman who was Peri [companion to Doctors Fifth and Sixth], fleetingly in the John Lewis advert? [Yes, I found after much frame-by-frame research.]

* On which note… CELERY SQUEE!!! [This is a reference to the latest Who episode, which I won't further explain so that I don't give away spoilers.]

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Today's Big Question: Which household device*, appliance or gadget would you least want to give up? Why?

* note: this does not include "personal entertainment devices in phallic forms".

Dear Volvo Driver On A12: You might want to know that on a two-lane roundabout with dual-carriageway entrances and exits, keeping to your lane and not just driving across the fecking thing as if it wasn't there is a good way to keep the side of your car unblemished by Priscilla's front end [as well as to stop your nose being broken afterwards]. Thank you.

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Marigolds Season. Again that time of year has come around where the house needs a good thorough going-through [but don't we all? ] for when the landlord comes to visit in a bit under three weeks' time.

This time, I've got the big guns coming in. Three women I know who work as cleaners at my town's high school will be doing the job for me [for a fee, natch]; the idea being that if they can cope with the mess and detritus left by delinquent teenagers, they can cope with anything I can throw at them.

Even [and yes, I've checked this first] if they happen to find any, ahem, nefarious items whilst they're doing it…

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Thirty-Eight. For those who don't know, Sunday is my birthday. No, this isn't a plea for you to rush out and post me cards, presents and expensive lingerie*; it'll be a normal Sunday in that I'm working the night before and will be snoozing on the sofa for most of it.

But I do want to say thank you to the gorgeous Esther for the birthday postcard;

….which is apparently a 1m-tall sculpture by this artist which she thinks is an asparagus monkey and I think is an asparagus torso. Although in this photograph I can't quite make out the "bits" at the bottom, so I'd have to go and examine it up close in whatever art gallery it happens to reside in.

It's been far too long since I went to an art gallery. There's nothing of any value round here, it being "sell pretty pictures of Suffolk landscape in Constable pastiche style to urban tourists" country, but there is one outstanding piece of artwork in the area;

Maggi Hambling's "The Scallop", on nearby Aldeburgh beach, which stands as a tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten. Of course, this being Suffolk, when it was put up seven years ago there were complaints. And it's had paint thrown at it a few times.

Some years ago, I was helping out a friend by working in an art materials shop some way further inland. I remember one day serving a woman customer who seemed absolutely fearsome, as if she had an aura six miles wide, who made me want to hide behind the counter. It's good to know I've met the Scallop's sculptor in real life .

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* unless you really, really want to, in which case I definitely ain't saying no.

[title from this bitchenly amazing song/band]

Today: yet another in the occasional series of "letters I've composed but am too chicken to actually send".

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Dear Magazine Whose Name Begins With F. And Which Is Sold On The Top Shelf,

Thank you for your email, in which you say that the little piece I wrote for you as a favour to a friend was "fucking amazing" and that you'd welcome any more contributions I had.

Unfortunately, further down this mail you included the phrase "sadly we can't pay", which collectively must be four of the most depressing words in the English language [alongside "after the break, Emmerdale"].

If this was the sort of publication, as well as the sort of contribution, which came with a byline [journalese: big sod-off "THIS BITCHENLY AMAZING ARTICLE WRITTEN BY" box], or if I were wishing to collect published contributions for a resume/CV, I'd probably be happy to bash some more out. Since it isn't, I'm not.

Yours journalistically,

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Dear Poking-Their-Nose-In-Landlords,

Yep, I know, it's come round again: you're going to pop round to ensure that I'm not trashing your treasured property, even though over the past five years I've paid you thousands of pounds for the privilege of staying here and I haven't smeared poo all up the walls¹ yet so why I should start now is anybody's guess.

At least, though, I should say thank you for giving me three weeks' notice, which means I can take my time tidying up and sorting out the place rather than rushing it all over the course of a few days.

And, I guess, looking round, it *does* need doing, so I guess I should welcome being given the motivation for tasks that otherwise far too often go into the "maybe later" box – which I know from 37 years' experience often becomes the "doesn't actually happen" box.

Just keep your nose out of *that* box next to the bed, okay?

Yours rentingly,

1 You get to see some strange sights as a roving social care worker. Maybe I should suggest that the woman who does the inspection have a secondment as one, so that she can see how well my surface-messy-but-at-least-hygienic-and-non-destructive laissez-faire attitude to housework compares.

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Dear Brain,

For smeg's sake: why oh why, of all the plethora of programmes available to you on your multi-channel Freeview-enabled television, have you become enmeshed in medi-soap-drama Holby City?

Rosie Marcel, who plays Jac Taylor.

Yes, I know, they put the signed version of it on at 1am on Sunday night/Monday morning when there's absolutely nothing else on the telly or radio, but you could always read a book or something instead.

I know you have a patchy record with this kind of thing – Prisoner [CBH] may not count because you watched it for wobbly-wall reasons rather than to follow the drama, but your teenage flirtations with EastEnders, Neighbours and Home And Away do count against you – and we all know what an addictive personality you are: watching Holby may not be quite as self-destructive as drinking a half-bottle of vodka every day, but the psychological processes aren't that different.

[Although, to be fair, unlike vodka Holby has never made me throw up, sing badly, or write mawkish teenage emo poetry of a sort that makes me cringe whenever I re-read it².

...yet.]

Yours nurse-the-screens!-ingly,

2 I keep it in a folder somewhere because although it makes me cringe and want to chop it into tiny little pieces and feed it to a badger, it also reminds me that although occasionally I still get low and feel like the world is on top of me, it is never as bad as it used to be.

…and relax.

Yet again, I've passed the six-monthly landlords' inspection with no quibbles whatsoever.

What was slightly different this time was a subtle change of tone; one of the few positive effects of the economic crisis, prompting a change in their thinking – from "you're lucky to be able to rent a place like this in a property prices boom town like this" to "hey, we're very happy to get a regular income off someone still in work, please stay". More emphasis was placed on whether I had any problems with the property, rather than whether the property had any problems with me.

None of this changes the need to still stay "onside" with them, which means keeping up the same level of cleaning routine; but it at least means it feels less like I'm being invaded on these occasions.

Anyway, here's the promised pics – click for biggerosity:

Downstairs bedroom. Still sleeping with books.

Some of which I want to keep within easy reach at all times. Killer whale courtesy of Pet.

The current reading pile. [Gawd knows what Wetlands will be like - I bought it on a whim after watching the twunts on Newsnight Review slag it off mercilessly: if someone like Tony Parsons thinks something is so bad, there must be some merit to it. ]

Reverse view from the bed; the front door is just the other side of the stairs. The door you can see is the shower and khazi.

I'm sure the books breed in warmer weather.

View as you just come in the front door. The stairs take a little getting used to, and I'm very glad I don't drink any more.

Upstairs looking south [from above the bedroom]. It's not exactly a kitchen built for top-class exotic cuisine.

Upstairs looking from above the shower room. The lack of storage space is always a problem, which is why I sit on a box of my CDs at the computer.

Lobster courtesy of Milly. If you could take all the money I've ever spent on Doctor Who DVDs, it'd probably feed a large Ukrainian family for fourteen years. [Maybe I should have cut out the middle man, and employed a large Ukrainian family to act the shows out for me?]

Today's Big Question: What's bitchenly amazing about your home?

Things I Found When I Was Sorting Out All The Crap In My House:

1. A previously unscanned photo [about three years old, judging by where I was working when it was taken];

2. A total of £1.73 down chairs, behind the bed, and – for some reason – behind the bog. [Which made me wonder if the tooth fairy has a sister - the turd fairy?]

3. The following note left for me one early morning by Butterfly eighteen months ago; a bitter-sweet feeling to find it, but also a proud one: warning – maybe TMI so click to read:

[with apologies to Pet that she usurped your title]

4. Lots of scraps of paper with random lists of things to do on them. I'm very good at making lists and very bad at actually doing the jobs on them.

5. The CD single of Internal Exile behind my computer desk:

6. Enlightenment.

[...no, not really.]