We have a fridge-freezer in the back kitchen and due to bad management it is, without a doubt, the most wasteful bit of electrical equipment in the house.

It was grand when the children were living at home and we only had a small fridge in the kitchen. Then it could accommodate the overflow, not to mind the batches of lasagne, shepherd’s pie, buns and apple tarts that kept the freezer filled.

But now with only the two of us at home, it’s basically redundant except for parts of the year such as Christmas.

After Christmas, it’s forgotten about until I’m looking for a bowl and, having searched up and down, get an eureka moment and head for the fridge-freezer in the back kitchen.

There’s the bowl with a withered salad, along with a couple of other plates of mangy food well past their sell-by dates.

Every year I swear it won’t happen again and, lo and behold, this was the year I thoroughly cleaned the fridge-freezer before Christmas was officially over.

Bar for a few blocks of ice cream, puff pastry vol-au-vents and some lamb chops, the freezer is virtually empty.

The fridge likewise. With so little in it, there’s no way it’s paying for the electricity it’s using. Yet what do you do?

If I turn it off, we lose the freezer. That’s not a runner as I’m very partial to an ice cream wafer on a Sunday evening, not to mention Sean’s fondness for a puff pastry mince pie.

So there it will stay, humming away, wasting electricity – a big clunking reminder of life with children when I was a domestic goddess with a freezer full of treats.

Talking about treats, I spent Saturday with over 40 Limerick women (mostly) celebrating Nollaig na mBan.

This ritual of a nice lunch, plenty of time to chat and the exchange of a token gift was established by Ann Gabbett and continued by Mary Mullane.

As chair of Limerick IFA Farm Family committee, this year’s social was organised by Mary Breen and a grand job she made of it.

I hadn’t been in the Woodlands Hotel, Adare, for a while and it was lovely to see the personal touch was still very much in place.

Originally vegetable farmers, owner Mary Fitzgerald and her late husband Dick started with a three-bed B&B on the farm and grew it into the very substantial business it is today.

Despite catering for a big wedding on the same day, Mary was there to have a word with all our group. That’s what I call minding your business.

And here’s another treat for you. It’s January, the days are grey, the weather miserable and calving and lambing aren’t far away.

So, wouldn’t it be lovely to have a great break away to look forward to when the heavy work is over? Thanks to Fisherman’s Friend, we have a lovely competition to find out if you are one half of Ireland’s greatest friendship.

There’s €1,000s worth of fabulous Blue Book Hotel – gorgeous places – vouchers up for grabs. All we need is a photo and 150 words, so get your entries in. Full details are on page 36.

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