All Things Considered

Old Skool Kool
Posted by Kate Sullivan

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.

Posted by Kate Sullivan on July 6th, 2007