By the time I went to bed on Monday night I was sick to death of the sight of fridge/freezers, measurements and cubic capacities were running round my head, but I couldn’t ignore the fact we still didn’t have one and time was running out.

So my first job on Tuesday morning was to get back online and order one. Sadly I still couldn’t get on the website properly and all the information I input the previous evening had disappeared. To cut a long story short we managed to get it sorted, and were fortunate to be still looking at a Thursday delivery. That meant we would have been without a fridge for almost a week.

Obvious casualties such as ice cream had been thrown out immediately, but other perishables such as butter, milk, bacon and cheese had been packed into the freezer compartment to preserve the coldest temperature possible for the longest time. We turned off the radiator in the kitchen, and were helped by the cool weather.

We gradually got used to drinking warm beers and eating things in the order they might be going ‘off’. Ready meals, fish and chocolate desserts were all eaten way passed their ‘use by dates’. Even so, by the time Thursday morning arrived we were getting a little desperate, but butter, cheese and bacon were still edible.

The delivery was booked for 10am – 2pm, so I was delighted when it arrived at 9.30am. The delivery men took the old soldier away and delivered his brand new replacement without a hitch. All we had to do was let it stand for 2 hours, then plug it in.

Time ticked by. At 11.30am we flicked the switch on the socket, nothing. We tried the adjacent socket, still nothing. Despair was quickly creeping in. We checked the fuse box in case the old fridge’s demise had ‘thrown’ the switch, but no. More despair. Finally we plugged it into a completely different socket. Success, lights and a soft whirring noise. The fridge works, the double socket must be faulty.

But wait. Could this mean that the old fridge wasn’t broken at all? Had we sent him away to be destroyed and he wasn’t actually dead!! I actually felt quite cruel at the thought.

In conclusion. There is too much information out there, other peoples opinions simply confuse the issue and can be downright misleading. The people who said it sometimes ‘mooed like a cow’ must have never heard a cow, or our previous fridge for that matter. It is almost silent.

Manufacturers who recommend throwing out all frozen food after a period of 24 hours are scaremongering. A few commonsense precautions can work wonders. If it looks OK, and smells OK, the chances are it is OK. I’m not advocating this as a lifestyle choice, but when needs must it works. I bet the cost of the food we actually threw away was less than £20.

Finally, the most important thing of all. When an electrical appliance fails, always try it in another socket before pronouncing it ‘dead’!