Our fridge is testament to magnetic memories
How cheering to learn that fridge magnets are the nation’s favourite holiday souvenir. We’ve been assiduously collecting them for years, to the point where our fridge door is entirely covered in mementos, each with its own tale to tell.
There’s a gargoyle from the Gothic cathedral in wonderful medieval French city of Bourges we visited before the children were born.
The bowl of bright lemons was bought on a magical family break to Sicily, when Daddy insisted we go and have lunch in Inspector Montalbano’s favourite restaurant down the coast.
I picked up the Spanish Infanta Margarita Teresa on a crazy girls’ weekend in Madrid, and the tiny babouche slipper from Tunisia is a reminder of being stranded in five-star luxury when that unpronounceable Icelandic ash cloud descended in April 2010.
The magnet from Southwold is an aide-memoire for the weekend the dogs got lost, and the metal Machu Picchu sparks recollections of the hummingbirds just outside our hotel room in the cloud forest below.
My husband’s favourite is Raeburn’s Dr Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, which hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. Mine is the Lilliputian baguette from Paris, where I schlepped at dawn to interview Marianne Faithfull and she made me buy my own takeaway coffee in the café down the street, rather than brew one for me.
We often spend a whole fortnight deciding which magnet to buy. Certain rules apply, too; at least one of us must have been to the actual country, city or monument depicted.
The only exception to this is the puffin magnet from St David’s, as I’ve never actually seen one. But, after much discussion, the children have allowed me to display it anyway, on the grounds that meeting a puffin on a boat trip to Skomer constitutes a life goal.
To William Morris’s edict, “Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”, I would add: “And above all, it must be autobiographical.”
Like a fridge magnet, everything you own should tell a story – not about the Coliseum or the Guggenheim, but about you, those you love, and the dreadful day the dogs went missing.