She's gone. Early this morning. Everything simply came to an end. All that time. We'd been together for sixteen years. Both of us knew that after that length of time, everything that could have been said, had been. There was nothing I could say to bring her back. Irrevocable. Broken down.

Opening the door last night, I knew something was wrong; she sounded different. Laboured, almost like she was on the point of sobbing, but managing to hold it back. But only just. And she was shaking, I'd never seen that before. That shocked me. What the hell had I done? When I'd left to go to work, she was fine, humming like she always did. It's true: lives's really can change in a heartbeat. Mine had. I went up to her. If anything that made it worse, the staccato, punctured noises seem to deepen. Why was she doing that? All of the days and nights we'd spent together, she'd never howled like that. Never howled at all, in fact. I reached out to her. Hot to the touch and sweating.

Yes, I'm a man, so I agree what I did next, might be unfeeling, harsh even, still would n't a woman do the same as I did? It was the only thing. There was nothing else. I bent over, almost on my knees, stretched my hand out... and unplugged her. My fridge breathed it's last fresh breath yesterday. I'd caught it in it's death throes. When a fridge has the inside temperature of a cooling oven, is shaking, and starting to drip, that's all you can do.

After a long and radical defrost - if electrical goods stores are looking for that extra customer wrap, then every fridge they sell should come with it's own pasta bowl, blunt table knife, and hammer, because for me there's no better tool kit than this when it comes to emergency defrosts. The pasta bowl of hot water left in the belly of the fridge to thaw the iceberg that's built up over the years, and the gentle tap, tap of the hammer on a blunt knife to loosen it all.

If I look in my kitchen right now, I simply see the beached hulk of an old friend. In a couple of days time, the council are going to turn up, take it away and inter it on some fridge mountain. Me, well, got to buy another. It's too hot to leave milk on the window ledge, and even if it was n't, it'd be too tempting for the local squirrels not to want try a dairy diet. Tomorrow, I have to be domestic, I have to buy a fridge.