Chilling tales of what lurks in your fridge

Six eggs, ham, a half-eaten pavlova, orange juice, an iceberg lettuce, a tub of houmous and four large dessert spoons. They say you can tell a lot about a person from what is in their fridge - although the presence of cutlery in mine may leave you baffled. Cold spoons work wonders for the dark morning circles under my eyes.

These are, however, nowhere near the strangest items you find in Britons' fridges. A consumer survey of 4000 households across Europe has found that refrigerating non-food items is more common than we think. A quarter of Europeans keep medicines in their fridge, 6% use it to store glue, 3% keep nail varnish and 1% store tins of paint and batteries.

Fridges are like a mirror of their owner's personality. Some are scrupulous about cleanliness, whereas others have long-forgotten chutneys, pickles and sauces secreted on the top shelf. A poll in 2011 found that one in 10 Britons stored insects and pets in the fridge, a third kept makeup and 2% their false teeth.

When household refrigerators were first invented in the 19th century, they were used to store lotions and potions, not food. These days, chemists recommend chilling certain medicines to protect the active ingredients .

Daisy Bell, a writer from Wolverhampton, stores her nail polish in the fridge. "It makes the varnish easier to apply when it's cold and stops it from clogging up," she said. Similarly, Manchester-based Sarah Clayton keeps hair-styling products in hers. "I was advised that the coconut oil wouldn't go off as quickly in the fridge. Now I keep lip balm in there, too," she said.

Bed linen and cashmere, sealed in vacuum bags, can benefit from being stored in the fridge; advocates claim the cold kills off moths and bugs. Others use the fridge for safekeeping. One friend's grandmother kept her jewellery in there, sealed in Tupperware boxes, to hide it from burglars. Food critic Giles Coren keeps his car keys in the fridge because he is "always losing them".

Candles, batteries and camera film all have a longer shelf life if kept at a low temperature. A colleague stores his cellphone there to stop the sun frazzling the software and running down the battery.

More unusual still is the practice of keeping live pets in the chiller. Clare Pidsley, from Burton, Staffordshire, stores a tortoise named Tilly in the fridge during hibernation - at the suggestion of the Tortoise Trust. "It's to regulate and monitor the temperature," she said. "[The tortoise] is in our second fridge in the garage, not in the kitchen with the lettuce."

While the to-fridge-or-not-to-fridge debate rages over certain vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes and onions, to name a few), there is no hard-and-fast rule for non-foodstuffs. A radio presenter even admitted to finding a pair of socks in the office fridge. "Fortunately," he said, "we've moved buildings since then."- ©The Daily Telegraph, London