a fridge in the garage

On Saturday some old friends came round for supper and they brought a fridge.

Not just an ordinary fridge (for this was no ordinary supper) but a 144-bottle capacity wine-fridge: 174cm high, about the same weight as a 2m x 1m  section of glass flooring, and about as easy to lift out of the van.

The destination was the corner of my garage  - at the far end of about 100m of roughly-surfaced back alley, all without the aid of huskies

Luckily my friends had thought ahead and they had brought with them a small dentist’s trolley - by which I mean a small trolley belonging to a dentist, rather than a regular trolley belonging to a small dentist. Although on reflection it was both.  Whatever:  neither the trolley nor the dentist were capable of moving the fridge without the help of three grown men and lot of cursing.

So anyway : my friends and I, and Botogol junior, set to with enthusiasm and carefully manoeuvred the fridge along the alley, into the garage and shoved it snugly into the corner, whereupon we replaced the shelves, filled it with two dozen bottles of prosecco (and three of ancient port) and switched it on.  The motor hummed into life and I with pleasure. It will be just perfect for my Condrieu. If only I hadn't drunk both bottles.

Then, because it was only three o clock and  dinner wasn’t nearly ready yet, my friends took their van home, Botogol Jnr disappeared to play a game of no-racquet squash, and the very moment they had all left I changed my mind about where I wanted the fridge.  So, I switched it off again, removed all the bottles and the shelves, remounted the wall-bracket for the lawnmower, moved the wheelbarrow and my Squires  three-piece luxury rake set, and commenced the task of shifting a two-ton fridge to the diagonally opposite corner of the garage, entirely on my own, watched by a relaxed and amused Mrs Botogol, enjoying a glass of warm prosecco.

I grunted and heaved; heaved and grunted.

“You look like an Easter Islander with brand new moai”, Mrs B observed, not unkindly, “..so why don’t you move it the way they moved theirs?”, and with that she sauntered, light-footed out of the garage.

 “Of course”, I thought to myself, “I’ll fetch the axe and chop down the ornamental eucalyptus tree and make some rollers”

....

“I just don’t think they could have done it like this”, I remarked to Mrs Botogol, an hour or so later, sweating in the furnace heat of a garage no longer shaded by beautiful eucalyptus, pondering the crushed and sorry remains of seven tree-trunk rollers.  “This will never work. The garage smells nice though”

“You fool, Alibert”, she said, pushing her shoulder firmly against the fridge, and rocking it gently from side to side  “That wasn’t the way they did it”


Q: If an ersatz writer and one-time blogger chops down an imaginary tree as a joke for his blog, but there is no one out there to read it, is it still funny?