AS I drove home on Friday night I got a distinct deva-vu feeling involving a falling wardrobe. It wasn't actually a wardrobe that did it, it was a fridge-freezer and it was in the back of my car and that little inner voice which should have said 'What the hell do you think you are doing?' had remained silent until now. It should have spoken up a few hours before, when I had spotted the fridge-freezer for sale in the bargain ads, but had remained resolutely silent as I had picked up the telephone, spoken to the owner and arranged to see the item. Silent too as I completed the deal and, helped by the now ex-owner, loaded it into the back of the car. It was a sort of impulse-buy by telecommunication. I had been looking at fridge-freezers, I wanted a fridge-freezer, and I had spotted the exact sort I needed a jolly sight cheaper than buying new. And let's face it, most fridge-freezers don't do anything much else whether they are new or slightly used. What I hadn't worked out was how on earth was I going to get it into the house. Things which slide into the backs of cars have, sometimes, a stubborn resistance to being slid out again. I know from experience. This might have been fine until it dawned on me that the family were away, other people who might have helped were away and I could hardly troll round the streets asking neighbours and strangers if they would like to give themselves a hernia by carrying a fridge-freezer for a crazy woman. Being a woman, and we're good at this, I decided to shelve the problem until the following day. I drove home, parked and went inside, banishing all thoughts of white goods stuck in the back of a Fiesta. Come the morning, I drove very carefully and very early down to the shops to get a paper, carefully because I didn't want a sliding fridge-freezer to stun the back of my head. Then I went back into the house for an hour or two and put it out of mind again. Nevertheless, it niggled all morning and I knew that I'd have to try to get it out later, unless I wanted to drive round for the next week with a large white object obscuring my rear view. The worst scenario was that I would have to leave it in the drive. Well, actually the very worst scenario was that it would be stuck under the parcel shelf, but the drive was the next worst, and I'd have to pretend it was some form of modern garden art. Well, I suppose if that Tracy woman can get thousands for an old unmade bed she says is a form of modern art, I could possibly get away with a fridge-freezer draped with a clematis in the garden. As it happened, the fridge-freezer slid miraculously, and without damage, onto a blanket and I walked it into the house without much difficulty and with a great deal of satisfaction. 'Who needs a man,' I thought, and not for the first time. It was a lesson learned, or rather not learned, that impulse buying of large things is not a good idea. I can still see the incredulous look on the face of the man at Trago when he saw I was intending to get a 14ft-long carpet into the rear seat of a non- hatchback Ford Sierra. 'You'll have to fold it', I said airily. 'Fold it,' he almost screamed, 'it's carpet, not a tablecloth.' And the wardrobe? Oh yes, this was another lesson in how people who are not expert removers of furniture should leave well alone. Those of us who decide that we can move ourselves because it can't be that difficult realise some hours later, when covered in sweat, abrasions and blackened fingernails, that it is. I used to be an impulse mover of furniture, just to make rooms look a bit different. My husband frequently came home late and sank down onto a sofa which proved not to be there anymore, but situated over the other side of the room. It was a cause of altercations between us, particularly when he climbed into bed one night and found himself face down on the carpet with the nightstand under him. My nemesis proved to be a large Victorian wardrobe, given to us when we first married by an aunt. In those days people gave away large, cumbersome bits of furniture because they were not fashionable and the recipients had to appear terribly grateful as another incredibly ugly bit of Queen Vic was carried in. Today, they are worth a fortune. I don't know why I decided to move the bedrooms round that day. Probably I was bored. Anyway, all went well with most of the changeover until it came to the wardrobe, which was heavy even when empty, but I dragged it across the hall and into the doorway. Easy, I thought, just a little tip here and little nudge there and through it will go. Of course, it didn't, it was just a fraction of a centimetre too large. Pushing and shoving got it in a little further and then I made the mistake of going into the room to pull a little teeny bit. That teeny bit was my undoing because there was a cracking sound and the wardrobe fell forward, the wood across the top of the door made a cracking sound and I quickly discovered that the wardrobe would neither move forward nor backwards and I was trapped inside the room at 9am in the morning and nobody was due home for another eight hours. I couldn't even yell for help because the room was at the back of the house. To cut a long story short, I eventually had to climb out of the window, wearing nothing but a nightie and a very short dressing gown – I'd been sitting down to breakfast when I got the brilliant room- moving idea – and a pair of fluffy slippers. I crept along the guttering, avoiding the conservatory room, jumped onto the flat roof of the extension then onto the rockery below, where I fell in an ungainly heap. It was, of course, raining. The worst was over, except having to explain a cracked lintel and a trapped wardrobe later in the day. I can't remember how long the promise never to move furniture around again lasted, but it probably wasn't long. As a footnote I do remember that on one occasion I tried to get a very large sofa out of the sitting room to store in the garage, and it, like the wardrobe, proved just too big to get through the door. It's always been a mystery to me why large pieces of furniture go in, but then won't come out. A kind of furniture removers' law, I suppose. I asked my son to have a go later, and when I came home he said he and a friend had managed fine, no problem at all. Males do that, make light of things with that slight 'you're only a woman' snigger which can annoy a little bit. But he'd done it, and I was pleased. Until I went into the garage to see where they had put it. There hadn't been a problem, that was true. They'd got it though the door without a hitch. They'd sawed it in half.
