"There's nothing wrong with the one we've got"

I am not an extravagant woman - no, really, I'm not. I was brought up in a household whose habits had been shaped by rationing and hard times and I simply wouldn't understand a way of life that didn't involve saving bits of string or picking up the postman's red rubber bands from the pavement (we have a drawer full of them. They'll come in handy one day). For goodness' sake, even my best new raincoat was got from the charity shop. Glorious though it is, I wouldn't have paid for it new.

But even I want new things sometimes. Take our fridge (I wish you would take our fridge). I hate it with a passion that is entirely disporportionate. We've had it for twenty years, and on the day it was delivered - when it finally was delivered, late at night, after many many phonecalls and a huge amount of vituperation, Husband asked me as they were lugging it up the drive if I was fed up enough that I wanted to tell them to take it away again, we didn't want it any more. I said no, now it was finally here we'd stick with it - and I've regretted that decision ever since. (Mind you, I've never been back into the shop that sold it to us and I never will).

It is half fridge and half freezer, neither half being very large. It was the first freezer we ever had, and as we outgrew it, we bought another freezer in addition and it works very well, having the little one in the kitchen and the big one in the shed. But we are still stuck with the little fridge. There were only two of us when we bought it - now there are four and I can't fit into it the things that need to go in. I want a new one and a bigger one.

After twenty years of hard knocks, it isn't in the best shape - bits of trim are missing, one of the salad drawers is broken, and the handle regularly falls off, plus if you push the butter to the back it freezes solid to the back wall. But it does still work. So what does Husband say when I make the case for a new fridge? "There's nothing wrong with the one we've got."

Sages and poets say that the saddest phrase in the language is, "If only". Sages and poets don't have Husbands and knackered (but alas still functioning) fridges.