1) INVENTED BY A MAN!!

Jilly Cooper has written a book entitled "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom" and I have written an addendum to her book which I will no doubt publish one day.

However my most pressing book will no doubt be about inventions designed by MEN!! For example a chest deep freezer could only have been designed by a man, I defy anyone female and short to be able to defrost a chest freezer !!

Our chest freezers are the Antediluvian sort that do not have a self defrost capability. And apart from that they have elderly vacuum lids, so the slightest movement can bring down the lid with a crash on the head !! Some of my more cautious friends keep the lid up with a stick, but then remember my other book "Life is too short" ?? Now Zimbabweans are known for their superfluity of freezers, as in days gone by, we were avid hunters and gatherers, and old habits die hard.

One needed to purchase great quantities of bread, meat, milk when one saw them available which was not often. Hailing from farming stock was also a drawback as one was always tempted to buy a hind quarter of show beef or a whole sheep for the deep freeze !!

Now HeeHoo is probably the greatest purloiner of beef in the world. He loves to go to cattle sales and buy whole beasts, it must be the misplaced farmer in him that rises to these occasions.

He does not give a thought to the Little Woman who needs to find a place to freeze a 700KG piece of prime Show Beef. Now please do not envision a poor wee beastie still with its with skin on, with four feet sticking up out of the freezer !! Its not all in one piece I hasten to add, our very special and friendly butcher cuts it beautifully into portions, joints, roasts, silverside, steaks, chops, ribs, bolo etc and labeled them accordingly.

However recently I neglected to remind said blockman that we are now a family of just two, so six giant chops in one packet was probably unwise !!

This little milk toothed Bos Taurus needed to be loaded into no less than 3 chest freezers (and of course it was delivered on the hottest day of the year. )

One year our mombi took so long to freeze that it went off and we had to deliver it to Chipangali Animal Orphanage to feed the lions, so I knew what to do this time to ensure rapid and effective freezing. In due time faced with 700 kegs of successfully frozen prime show beef, I did my best to rissole it, barbecue it, slumgullion it, casserole it, jerky it, pot -roast, smoke it and potpie it, but eventually even HeeHoo started to crave fish and chicken or even macaroni cheese !!

As long as the freezers are chock a block full, they do not require defrosting, but we are now down to the fourth quarter as it were, and I can no longer ignore the glaciers that are appearing !!

The rule in the house is that the defrosting procedure is so laborious without Charlie, that is only done when the old machines are groaning under a thick layer of ice and the motors sound like a day at Le Mans. When HeeHoo sees me climbing into my ski boots and ski bib, gloves and wooly hat on a summers day, I have to catch him quickly or he finds a sudden an urgent golf game to play !!

It is after all the only way to defrost a chest freezer when one is two bricks and a tickey tall. Come on - you just try cleaning it any other way, I defy you, leaning over on the edge of a freezer, trying to get right to the bottom where the water has gathered, is harmful to the body.

Short legs flailing in the air, squashing the very breath from one's lungs, and remember women do have those uncomfortable things in front which hurt when crushed !!

The only way to do it properly is to climb inside in full ski gear, prop the lid up securely so it does not, God forbid, close and suffocate one in a watery chilly grave.

As it is, when one emerges from a defrosting stint, one feels like a cross between a sorbet and a frappe ! Bruised and battered, breathless and verging on vegetarianism !!

Thank you so much to that tortuous MAN who designed chest freezers !!