The AP Memorial Fridge

At some point between the old woman's bedroom and the War of the Publisher's Office, AP acquired a fridge. (It may possibly have been requisitioned from the household-appliance rubble abandoned during the publisher's humiliating retreat.)

It was a proper fridge too, full-size and tremblingly groaning when it ran during the summer months, not one of these mini-bar things you now find in the baskets of sturdy bicycles or something. If the AP Fridge had fallen over, it would triumphantly have killed someone.

The fridge was used to house cooling drinks and ice-lollies, but more importantly to celebrate those who had left the magazine. As the eras progressed the AP Fridge transmuted like not a very good Transformer into the AP Memorial Fridge, scattered across with mementos and keepsakes. These usually comprised an ex-APer's facial photograph from Who Do We Think We Are? attached commemoratively to an inappropriate body. (For example, the Steve McGoony-Bird later scanned back into the mag after we'd managed incompetently to lose all the official portraits;* and, for some reason nobody could remember five minutes after applying it with blu-tak, Matt Bielby on a proud old lady's torso pointing to a distant sunset as she exhorted her sons to GO! AND DO YOUR DUTY in World War One.) It was our Pyramid of Geezers.

As the steady washing river depositing new AP bods like less bearded Moseses and sweeping old ones tidily into the open sea gradually reduced to an ankley drizzle, the remaining spaces on the AP Memorial Fridge were covered with things which amused us instead. The fridge itself had become a close, personal friend with a big flat face and a stomach you kept things in some time ago, with the ever-busy endemically lazy AP staff purchasing groceries at lunchtime and storing them within to save queuing in shops after work finished for the day, and Cam's magnanimous idea of The AP Afternoon Tea providing a valuable social role for the proud brrr-box.

With the razing of the AP Office, the fridge itself became a memorial. Trapped in this paradox, it vanished in a spooky swirling vortex, destroying seven bystanders. Of this we approve.