A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The world has been led to believe that every home needs a bigger fridge so you can store and freeze more food – and even dispense ice and water from the big American variety – but the reason for massive fridges is far more mundane than that.

It’s to accommodate all your fridge magnets.

Because you can hardly go away for the weekend now without returning with a keepsake – a plastic or ceramic depiction of your destination’s most famous tourist attraction, or Church, or ancient warrior, which will then take pride of place on the front of your fridge.

Like sausages, you don’t really need to spend too long thinking about where they came from – and the romantic old innocent in you would like to believe there was some local cottage industry fashioning these iconic images like Aran women used to knit jumpers.

And of course you’d be wrong.

Because there’s a better chance your fridge magnet came from a man called Charles Zhao, who gave up his job in the Civil Service 15 years ago to open a fridge magnet factory in the Chinese city of Wenzhou.

He now sells around €4 million worth of product to tourist towns everywhere. Which means that, while he hasn’t entirely cornered the global market, he has captured iconic images of places he most definitely has never seen.

Once upon a time, you’d come home from Torremolinos with a big donkey wearing a sombrero and you’d return from Paris with a beret; Australia was the home of the corked-bedecked hat and you’d have thought you were hilarious to wear a fez back from Turkey.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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