Friday, October 10, 2008

TV - THE WORST INVENTION?


one less tv
Originally uploaded by Kevin Steele
You all know we've been building a new kitchen in our back room for about 5 years - OK so maybe it is just one and I'm having a sleep-deprived day.
I am not sure I have ever mentioned the fate of our old kitchen. Being a room with a fairly small window, unlike our living room which has two conservatory-sized windows, we decided it would be a much better room for the TV. At the moment we can barely see the screen because of the large south-facing windows (well on that annual sunny day anyway).
But I am not 100% sure that is the best idea.
Why?
Well, we've bought beautiful sea blue wall paper that I really like. We've also bought solid wood flooring which is just beautiful, especially in comparison with the hideous carpet and boring cream walls in our current living room.
So where's the problem? The TV, of course. I hate TV with a passion. To me TV is a way of whiling away your entire life watching noisy, meaningless wallpaper instead of living it. André was a big TV fan. It had to be on all the time. I often thought that if the house caught fire, he'd have carried the TV out before me! Ironically, in the divorce settlement, I got one of his 42 inch TVs! I can just about put up with TV if you check listings and turn it on if something of interest to you is on. But these days many people have so many channels, they turn it on and zap between channels till they find the least bad option to leave on as their constant wallpaper. Marcel is very like his father in that respect. Without me to nag constantly and clamp down, Marcel would live on meaningless gutter TV - endless reality TV: X factor, Big Brother, US cartoon sitcom reruns and rereruns, game shows (even the worst ones based only on luck, not even general knowledge - like that nonsense with Noel Edmonds and red boxes), soaps like The Bill etc etc. On a good day I let him watch a few shows without nagging, on a bad day I rant about his future wife leaving him because he prefers TV to her! I'm off on a tangent...
What I started to say was. I don't watch TV. I would average my TV viewing at about 30 minutes a week max, so why make the TV room the cosiest in the house, so my big son disappears happily into his new room while all of us who are indifferent to TV (Thomas, Charlotte and I) sit in the room with the horrible carpet and drab decor?
It seemed like a good idea at the time...

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