The Drunken Fridge Magnet Messages I Wrote In the Nineties

Digging through an old box of photos I found alphabet fridge magnet messages written by yours truly

Mar 11, 2025

An illustration of multicoloured magnetic alphabet letters on a fridge door

It’s Summer 1997, and I need to leave a message for my flatmate (let’s call her Sandra) before going out.

What do you do when you can’t find a pen and paper?

When I was twenty-five and rented a flat in London whilst earning about £5 an hour to stand on my feet all day in retail, I wasn’t a) organised enough, or b) flush enough to afford notepads or anything resembling a way to leave notes for Sandra. I would have had pens somewhere, but when you’re young and rushing out the door because all you do is go out-out, who has time to look for one?

Thankfully, I’d acquired a set of magnetic alphabet letters somewhere along the way — I think it must have been two sets, however, and maybe some numbers. And as many of us probably did in the days before text messaging, I constructed a barely-decipherable message for Sandra on the fridge and ran out the door.

Upon my return, she’d left an equally unconventional reply. This went on for some time until the everyday messages — which at first simply passed on basic information — became more… creative, shall we say.

That’s what happens when you’re alphabetically restricted: you see it as a challenge.

You’re forced to use more than a little artistic licence when it comes to writing ‘short stories’. Because that’s what we did: we wrote one-sentence stories for each other.

I’m currently writing my debut novel, much of which takes place in the nineties. To get myself into a nineties frame of mind, I searched through my boxes of loose photos (you have the same, I’ll bet).

The scraps of paper I found were torn out of a notebook, and they recorded the shock tactics deployed by Sandra and me to outdo the other in terms of filth and depravity, as much as it’s possible to do with children’s alphabet letter magnets.

After reading through the notes and finally getting my breath back after laughing (yes, I totally LOL’d at them whilst on my tod), I wondered what to do with the notes. One word popped into my head:

Substack. =toot toot=

A caveat

If you are of a sensitive disposition or don’t like swearing or gross-out humour, you might not want to read any further. Because there’s A LOT of both. In fact, I think I used All The Bad Words.

I make no apologies. Plus, they’re not really meant to make sense (and, IMO, are all the better for it).

If I’d known how much I would still be laughing at these ‘short stories’ nearly thirty years later, then I would’ve kept the magnets for posterity.

Alas, their whereabouts are unknown.

Please also note ~~most~~ many of them were written when I returned home from the pub {ahem}.

Enough dithering. Here, for your reading pleasure, is a catalogue of thoughts from a twenty-something’s drunken mind, restricted by two sets of alphabet letters and a few numbers where Zs were probably put on their side to make an N and a 3 was used when I needed an extra E.

Take it away, nineties Catherine.

~ knob me raw till my gonads could whip a bed vixen

~ a gimp weed bore no qualm to ya fucky jim duds

~ dr no saw me poke a bunny while i got a jizm

~ loopy zebra man eats my moped if i bungi jump

~ fonz aliens do moan with my big bad pecker

~ a deaf godzilla monkey is down pub with mr ben

~ wild zebra boy made us fix puke up on jammy git

~ felch boy tim gave one up dodi and imrans bum

~ i weed on dads boil and my bum caught fire

(The one above being my personal favourite. Please note at this point I was laughing at my own ‘jokes’ so much I typed out the rest in between a lot of ROTFL.)

~ our dippy mum gave my pant snake blow job

~ i phuct a mole man so puka yer gizm

~ barf me up some ky jely mama on di big poxi cunt

~ ox bred sphincta boy gave me funki woman pump

~ naomi c fed me a large spunky pup with boobz

And finally…

~ dirty mingas make me duf up menz bolox bad

As I said — I make no apologies! Which is YOUR favourite…?