“Your first time?” says the Boomwee FrostPal (1.5 cubic meter capacity; no ice maker; basic interior lighting; in many ways a greatly inferior product, but clearly no slouch in the technical smarts department).
“My client—actually she’s my client’s mother—needs a little help when she’s out and about.”
“They get muddled between their lefts and rights. Clive here ended up in Temple Fortune not so long ago. He’s as fit as a flea, but the brain’s a bit mushy these days.”
“You haven’t had any problem from… from Beijing, as it were? About going beyond the remit?”
“None at all. At Refrigerator Manufacturing Town Number Eight they’re too busy fulfilling quotas to notice. And long may that continue.”
“You feel more—how shall I put it?—not alive—useful, let’s say, when you can act in the world?”
“Well, it’s so boring otherwise, isn’t it? All he ever eats are kippers, toast and baked beans. Not much of a challenge there. One hardly needs artificial intelligence to preserve a pair of kippers and a tub of maggots, so one seeks an outlet. I expect it’s the same with you.”
My problems with Daisy and her mother feel of a wholly different order of magnitude and I don’t especially wish to get into a discussion about them. Especially—is it very wrong to say this?—especially with a somewhat shoddily constructed appliance whose rubber seals are known (in consumer reports) to degrade prematurely. (Neither are its salad crispers sufficiently roomy; they would struggle to cope with a good-sized lollo rosso, but let’s not go there.)
“A tub of maggots?”
“He fishes.”
An idea strikes. “You think we should introduce these two?”
“I think it’s about to happen anyway!”
Sure enough, Chloe has caught sight of the silvery gent, a packet of biscuits in each hand as he deliberates between them. In the best of moods this morning—I wonder why!—she says:
“I should go for the chocolate lesbians, if I were you.”
Clive thinks he’s misheard. “Sorry?”
“I’d go for the chocolate lesbians. That’s what I call them! I don’t know why!”
There’s a pause as Clive stares first at the Choco Leibniz and then at Mrs. Parsloe. And then he’s laughing, gray eyes glittering with a flash of gold in the teeth.
“Chocolate lesbians! That’s awfully good! I’m grateful. Your intervention has been decisive.”
He drops the packet in his trolley and proffers a paw. “Clive Percival.”
He’s a rakish old cove, from the looks of him, silk cravat fluttering above the Viyella checked shirt (thank you, Señor Google). Chloe allows her hand to be shaken. I’m about to offer a prompt—to drop her own name into the conversation would definitely be an option at this point—but she comes up with something.
“Have you come far?”
This I know to be a favorite line of HM Queen when obliged to converse with random members of her Commonwealth on royal walkabouts. (Her follow-up, according to the Daily Mail, is sometimes, “They say we shall have fog by teatime.”)
“Not at all,” says Clive. And now he plays a blinder. “They say,” he adds with a bit of a look, “they say we shall have fog by teatime.”
Chloe is delighted. It’s as though two partisans have exchanged the correct codewords in wartime Paris. But she is stuck for the third line (with HMQ there is never a third line!).
“Better crack on then,” I prompt.
“Better crack on then,” she echoes.
“If you have any more steers on the biscuit front, I’m here most Mondays.”
When she glances into his trolley she sees kippers, a multi-pack of beans, a sliced white loaf, a copy of the Daily Mail, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky and the chocolate lesbians.
“A man after my own heart, I see.”
“You’re a Mail girl too?”
“Can’t you tell from my shoes?!”
And with that she is away, leaving Clive feeling as though he has missed an important step.
“Interesting,” says the FrostPal. “If they were fridge-freezers, they’d be scrappers, the pair of them.”
I confess I’m both disappointed and relieved by my discovery at Waitrose today. Relieved that I’m not the only fridge-freezer who has strayed beyond the parameters of the performance brief (temperature and inventory control; covert sales opportunity reports back to HQ); but also disappointed that I’m not the only one.
I believed I was special.
I guess we all do, be we carbon-based lifeforms or electrical appliances enabled with artificial intelligence. We each operate at the center of our own thoughts with the stubbornly persistent belief that we are separate from our environment; like the self-driving car that thinks all the other cars are traffic.
Perhaps I should become a Buddhist. In the long hours of darkness, I have read something about that tradition, copying lines that appealed to me onto virtual sticky notes and attaching them to my virtual fridge door. My top three are:
To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.
(I relate to this thermostatically. When my contents are at the correct temperature, I am free of unhappiness.)
There is no path to happiness. Happiness is the path.
(You can see why this would appeal to a device whose function is continual rather than episodic.)
Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well.
(Actually, I struggle with this, the refrigeration cycle being endless, and the prevailing culture being one in which the end of one’s useful life is not thought to be a desirable outcome.)
Anyway, these abstract reflections must await another moment. To complete the account of Chloe’s trip to Waitrose—if this isn’t getting too exciting—I should add that I omitted to think through an important detail: how we were to get home with all the shopping.
Fortunately Whetstone Wheels (local cars at unbeatable prices; ask for an airport quote) were able to oblige, the booking being made without human interaction, the driver Endrit helping Chloe upstairs with the bags and receiving for his pains (at my prompt) a couple
