I have got a house full of children.
I know two is not exactly a very lot, but of course there are the cats as well, and between them all they seem to make the house feel filled to bursting with bright youthful energy.
They got up early this morning to go for a run, the children, not the cats, obviously, after which they buzzed off to Kendal, but in between we had to try and sort out a terrible problem.
The television is not working.
As you know, it is not a real television, the sort that you can watch channels, but a screen which will get Amazon or Netflix, or, more often, a film of a welcoming fire on YouTube. We like this. It makes us feel warmer even though we aren’t.
Anyway, it doesn’t work.
It will not switch on.
Nobody ever uses the television when the children are not at home, the last time Mark and I tried to watch it we had forgotten how to switch it on anyway, and even the children do not use it very much, and so it could have been broken for months and nobody would have known.
Obviously we tried all of the things like the plug and the fuse. We changed the batteries in the remote control and then tried the all-purpose Internet fix of holding the switch down whilst you switch it on. All of these things. None of them work.
In the end I was reduced to looking on the mighty Internet for a solution.
The manufacturer, who is called LG, assured me on their brightly-coloured up-beat webpage that nothing was beyond their scope, and all I needed to do was answer a few simple questions and they would have it fixed in a jiffy.
The few simple questions, once they had got all of my personal identification data, a password that had to have more than ten characters, some capital letters, some symbols and no predictable sequences, and I had clicked the link in the email that they sent that took ten minutes to arrive, started with the model number.
Do you know the model number for your television? Neither did I. I would not even have known who manufactured it had it not been written on the box. I cut up the box up to provide boards for posting the Christmas Advent calendars that year, and then I saw it so many times that it was imprinted on my memory for all eternity.
Eventually I managed to find an archaic email from Curry’s, gathering dust in the murky bottom of my Inbox, which had the model number, and I copied it triumphantly, only to discover that the next question required the serial number.
This could be found, the webpage form explained politely, on the back of the television. Alternatively I could switch it on and go to the Menu and scroll down to About This Television, an exercise which in this case would have been wholly redundant.
The television is mounted on the wall. It is one of those modern, paper-thin creations, which looks as if it might snap given a high wind, and indeed, flexed terrifyingly when we installed it. I do not like touching it at all.
The gap behind it is just about big enough to get your fingers in.
There followed a wearisome half an hour, in which the children assisted at the beginning but then had to dash off to Oliver’s dental appointment, of cautiously sliding mobile telephones behind the screen and trying to take a picture of the label.
Oliver found this easier than I did, partly because he understands how his mobile telephone works. I got several pictures of the wall, couldn’t get the flash to work, and got a lot of pictures of my fingers.
In the end, I managed it. I got a blurry picture of a label with a long number which did indeed turn out to be the serial number, and dashed back to my computer to fill it in.
A cat joined me on the keyboard halfway through this exercise, which did not help.
Thank you, said the television manufacturer. We have got your case on file and we will call you when we get round to it, probably. Goodnight and thank you.
I gave up and rang a television repair man.
He wanted the serial number and model number as well, so my time had not been wasted, and he promised he would come on Monday.
The television manufacturer called this evening and said either I could give them five hundred quid to fix it, or else here was the number for the local repair man.
I had already called him so just thanked them politely and hung up.
The children are having to occupy themselves without Amazon Prime this evening. I have just called in to visit the bathroom, and everything is very quiet.
It is very nice to have our own cinema in our very own house, I will be glad when it is fixed. I do not often watch films, but I like them very much when I do.
Maybe on Monday.
