Old Skool Kool

A few years back, Stuart built me a shed. This romantic birthday gift sits at the front of the house opposite the kitchen window. The shed has a large solid old pine door and is angled into one of the corners of the garden. When I first looked inside my birthday shed, it was decked out with a collection of very odd auction items, one of them being the stylish ‘Osokool’ fridge.

Back in the 1950’s, this plaster of Paris cube with an aluminum inner lining and a nifty polystyrene lined plastic door, would sit commonplace in many boats and houses – so very carbon neutral. All you needed to do to keep your perishables cool was to keep the plaster damp and you would do this by topping up the bowl like top with cold water.

I’m pleased to say we do use our cool box. Usually at this time of the year, we would have made use of our Osokool on our camping trips, where it sits outside our tent door so we remember to water it along with a long plastic planter containing 4-week-old salad plants. You see, the great thing about the Osokool is that it is not only runs on a glass of water twice a day but if it rains, as it always does, you can just forget about it along with the salad leaves.