John: the mystery of fridge magnets

Jul 2 2009 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THERE are fewer barnacles on the Mary Rose’s bottom than there are magnets on our fridge door.

This encrustation had accumulated over the years. The grandchildren are fascinated by them, but it’s not particularly the shape, size or colour of them, or the fact that these tiny monuments to bad taste have come from all over the world.

It’s the suck of the magnetism that gets ’em, every time.

You can see it going round in their one-year-old heads: how does THAT work then? Let me take a pull at that one more time.

How did our collection start? Difficult to say.

One of the oldest ones is a little box of fruit and vegetables made from bakeable clay by my daughter was she was in her early teens. A banana or two might have snapped off, but it’s still hanging there. Maybe that’s the one that started us off.

They have become what Pip calls ‘memory bubbles’. They’re quite cheap in both senses of the word, and everywhere you go – a market town, cathedral, sea-port, museum, bird sanctuary – will have a rack of them from which to choose, if you are so minded.

I don’t think anyone has ever designed a tasteful fridge magnet, and given the concept of the thing – a scrap of material with a magnet glued to its bottom that you put on your fridge door – I don’t think they ever will.

We now quite deliberately look for the most naff magnet we can find. Badly made is cool. Tasteless and mawkish is better. Garish and ugly tops the must-have list.