I have lain in bed for much of the first day of 2025, pretending to be on the verge of taking a shower, and pondering what to make of it. An inauspicious start to a year that I fear is going to be another complicated one chez nous. I have been doom scrolling crochet memes and pondering how to approach 2024. I am still smarting from my 50th birthday and feeling my age, and the events of 2024 have reminded me of my own mortality.  Perhaps it’s the Christmas booze, but I keep daydreaming about the many ways in which life is like a Christmas fridge, which one day someone will unceremoniously unplug. The only resolution I’ve managed to make before dusk on day 1 is that I will write a blog post about why life is like a Christmas fridge. I’m regretting that already. I could have resolved to give up booze, stop eating food rich in carbs and fat and todo more exercise. But unfortunately my fridge is like a Christmas fridge and my wine rack is like a Christmas wine rack, and I can’t let it go to waste. There is still a whole baking camembert, a large wedge of brie and a host of other frankly unappetising cheese based products in the fridge, not to mention that 3 of the stockpile of port bottles remain, along with some rather nice claret. What is a slightly overweight middle aged girl to do but obligingly not let it go to waste/waist?

You see, life is like a Christmas fridge because its full of a variety of amazing tasty looking things, but some of them have a use by date and if you don’t eat them you must throw them away. Which is sad and wasteful. And sometimes life is like a Christmas fridge because you have to constantly take everything out to fit just one more thing in, or to get to the one thing you need at the back – and sometimes you even have to sacrifice something by taking it out just to make space for something that has a higher refrigeration need than the removed item. Decisions, decisions. Impossible decisions. And this is when you find yourself eating a whole xxxinsert item herexxx that you had to eat because there wasn’t room for it in the fridge.

Life is like a Christmas fridge because all those things in the fridge are like things I store in my brain. Sherlock has a mind palace. I have a Christmas fridge. Sometimes things languish forgotten at the back, never to be seen again. Sometimes they are retrieved and slung in the waste basket of life, and other times they have to be sacrificed to make room for new information that I need space for. The older I get the more I have that feeling that I am chucking out valuable information just to make way for enough room for whatever I’m working on now. Not only does require an increasingly sophisticated approach to stock rotation, but it squeezes out some of the good stuff that you really want to save. Memories of faces and moments constantly sliding down the back of the fridge into that place where all the gunky stuff goes. The older I get the more I feel like I need to get those memories out and feast on them just to make sure they are appreciated and deliver the joy (and sometimes sadness) that they were destined to give before the fridge door light goes off and they expire. No roast potato wants to go uneaten into the food recycling bin of life. And I’m pretty sure the light doesn’t stay on whilst the door is shut (I feel that this is probably a very profound metaphor, but I will need another snack in order to be able to truly understand it).

So, life is also like a Christmas fridge because you have to make choices. Sometimes one can be proud of one’s fridge efficiency. On Boxing Day I was exceedingly proud of my turkey leek and ham pie and boxing day pasties (made up of the leftover sprouts, sweet potato, roasties, turkey and peas and wrapped in the extra bits of pastry). But truth be told, I *still* have a largish hunk of 7 day old turkey which I know I will need to bin but don’t really want to admit I have failed to use up. It is skulking in the back of the fridge behind the camembert, like a guilty secret dressed in tinfoil. I know the moment of terminal decay is approaching – has probably arrived – and I will have to slide whole shelves of once tasty items into the black bag.

Life is like a Christmas fridge because there is always someone who is phobic or allergic to something inside it. Gluten, mushrooms, cheese…As it is in fridge, so it is in life. Increasingly, I keep my fridge door tight shut for fear I might provoke an unexpected attack of hives or anaphylactic shock, by the simple act of waving an offensive sausage in the air. Everyone is allergic to something in my fridge. Me, I’ll try most things once, and will spit out only a few items (cucumber, celery, dried fruit and anything pickled since you ask).

Oh, life really is like a Christmas fridge. I should be happy that my fridge is so well stocked – some people are only given a small carton of curdled milk, a rind of cheese, a dead fly and a half a mouldy cucumber on the top shelf – but at times it is an overwhelming and paralysing burden that sees me eating toast and making another cup of tea when I should be cooking some mad made up recipe of my own, or writing that novel I have been ‘about to write’ for several decades.

Yes, life is like a Christmas fridge. And I really should be feasting while I’m everything is still in date, and the light still works, rather than typing inane blogs as a distraction tactic. So, I’m off to make a cuppa and bake a camembert, whilst I ponder my next move. One thing’s for sure though. The answer is not to strive for a bigger fridge, but instead to make better use of it’s contents.

May 2025 bring you a varied diet of deliciousness, and a feeling of postprandial contentment.