TVlessness

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I’d come home to discover that my Sky+ box had failed to burn the house down, thanks to a zealous circuit breaker (whose wimpishly thin skin usually irritates me – I know about that light bulb – but has been forgiven on this occasion.  Did I write once about the time the TV in the caravan tried to murder me by inflammatory self-immolation, and the fusebox didn’t even notice?  I think I did.)

I watch very little television as a rule.  The six o’clock news, then whatever, if anything, catches my eye: four out of seven evenings, that’ll be ‘nothing’, and I’ll slip off to a book, a bit of music, someone’s blog or, as a last resort, my own.  I’ve discovered, though, that that’s rather like saying ‘I don’t usually read the ballet reviews in the paper’ or ‘I don’t eat much parsley’.  Both true; but there’s a strange form of anxiety that stems from the knowledge that ballet reviews, or parsley, may be gone forever from one’s life, isn’t there?  (Please say ‘yes’.)

So I ordered a new Sky+HD box.  It was meant to be delivered on Saturday, but arrived at 9.30 this morning – well done, Royal Mail!.  New chunks of technology scare me, but by half ten I’d plucked up the courage to unwrap it and start to follow the instructions.  The first one, predictably, was to uninstall the old box.  The first step of this was to unplug the connections to the satellite dish.  I did this, and the ends fell off.*

The brilliant lady at the Sky helpline was all sympathy.  “You must be desperate,” she said.  I explained – not really, to be honest.  “Oh, I would be.  I need it all the time, just for the background noise really.”  We have arranged for an engineer to come and fix it on Monday; so I’m not actually that far behind the curve.

Meanwhile, last night I watched my DVD of the amazing Rupert Goold production of ‘Macbeth’, about which I find I have written before.  I probably wouldn’t have done that if there’d been some live TV not to watch.

 

*This reminds me of a joke.