Halfway through dinner last Thursday, a friend phoned up to announce
that he had just bought himself a new fuckoff flat screen telly, and inform us
that if we wanted, we could take the old one off him. “Let me pass you on to Joseph,”
said the boyfriend, not wanting to be the one to be seen committing himself to
something that I have spent all summer saying is very low on my list of
priorities. (As a purchase, I meant, not a freebie. I never say no to a
freebie, me).
Having only hours before come across the bubble wrapped DVD
player in one of the boxes I unpacked during my shifting room frenzy last week,
I immediately said yes, thinking that now that the newly acquired (though not
at all new) sofa had transformed what was formerly the bedroom into a living
room, we needn’t sit crouched on folding chairs at the desk watching movies
online any more, but sit comfortably on the bright yellow, slightly House and
Garden c 1986, piece of furniture that the boyfriend has nicknamed Donatella,
and watch DVDs instead.
Within less than twenty four hours, we were at our friend’s picking up what is by today’s
standards a huge big dinasour of a TV, which to me seems perfectly fine. Not to
the taxi driver who took us home, it wasn’t! “I have three television sets in
the house,” he boasted. “What are you doing with that?” he asked, before
embarking on a monologue about his HD flayscreen – one of three sets in his home - which cost him €1200, the
other one which cost this and the third blah blah blah … that’s me not giving a shit
about what he was on about. I was
too busy signalling to the
boyfriend, warning him not to tip
the stupid git. That’s what you get for acting all superior with your passengers!
Back home, and in its designated location, all was plugged
and connected, and going. The original plan to limit viewing to DVD lasted all
of two days, after which, we were at the electrics shop buying the eight metres
of cable required to connect the evil box in the living room to the aerial
socket in the dining room (remember, in this household things are very basic).
So much for principles, the boyfriend hasn’t stopped reminding me.
This principles thing goes back to my saying that buying a television
set was not high on list of priorities. I said so because, from my experience,
the output of most Spanish TV stations consists largely of over-coiffed and
over made up men (as I type, there’s a guy sporting pink gloss on his bottom
lip) and women – Big Brother contestants turned z-list celebrities, gossip
columnists and “friends” of whoever’s private life it is they are dissecting –
screaming at each other, (those of you who have access to it, think Canale 5 in
Italy, and then think a lot worse ) which doesn’t exactly make you want to go
out and spend the same amount of money that you would something more useful,
like a wardrobe, or shelves to put the books that have been sat there on the
floor for ages on.
Anyway principles or no principles, the grey piece of
Phillips history has already become part of our daily lives, and we are now
spending most evenings in front of it. Hours previously spent at our desks or at the dining table
have now been replaced by watching the the above mentioned programmes,
all of which currently seem to talk of nobody but a folclorica who goes by the name of Isabel Pantoja, whose relationship with the ex-mayor of Marbella has come to a very nasty end and
who’s way of dealing with it, of course, is by appearing in a ten-page spread
on Hola in which she opens up about
what really happened with her man.
Knowing that my level of tolerance for trash TV is quite
high (my line is drawn at Malta’s Top
Model, imagine), my big worry is of course that I will become a couch
potato and get more and more embroiled in the dramas of the likes of la Pantoja, so if you start
seeing postings on this blog that seem to indicate that this is happening,
please, I beg of you, warn me, or arrange for someone to shoot me. Otherwise, before you know it, I’ll
be buying myself a subscription to Hola!
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