Ambition

I am not very impressed to learn that our glorious leaders intend to send us all to bed early for the next fortnight.

This is not great news for night-time taxi drivers, I can tell you.

It is even more not great news because we had just decided that we would have a Great Saving Up.

We want to buy a television.

I do not mean one of the dreadful things with channels, obviously. The BBC annoys me quite enough on the radio, without beaming them down to sit patronisingly in my living room as well.

Obviously I mean one of the splendid things that you can link up to your computer and use to watch films.

It is one of my ambitions, along with having hot water in the taps. I would like to be able to sit in a comfortable chair, a raspberry pink sofa would be perfect, order a takeaway and watch a film.

We decided today that we would make a supreme effort and be able to do this by Christmas.

We did have a television screen, as you know, but perhaps you don’t know that it does not work very well. It is not too bad when daylight things are happening, but if a scene is happening at night time, you can’t see anything except a lot of black squares. This is really irritating, and makes me cross with directors who plan moody scenes around camp fires in the gathering dusk, or who have murders taking place in the stilly watches of the night, so that we are left saying anxiously to one another: What just happened there?

All French films are out, obviously, although that would probably be the case anyway.

We got so fed up with it we have even tried watching films on Mark’s laptop computer, but this is a bit rubbish because even with my best glasses on I can’t see the little screen properly. For it to be close enough we have got to have it on our knees, which means that one of us has got to hold on to the screen bit so that it doesn’t keep flopping backwards.

We have decided that since we can’t do theatre and pantomimes and cinema, and we don’t like going to pubs, we would like to entertain ourselves at home, and in that case we want a television which has a picture all of the time.

Obviously not when it is switched off. We have got a proper picture that we thought we would like to hang in front of it at those times.

We had to go to Kendal today, because I needed more paint and Mark was not at work but needed some plumbing fittings, and whilst we were there we thought that we would go and have a look at televisions.

I think the man in Curry’s thought we were a bit backward, because on the whole we had not got a clue what he was talking about.

Do you know that I had no idea that you needed a special sort of aerial to watch the television?

I had some vague idea that it just magically appeared in the box from some enchanted cloudy cyber-land, but this turns out not to be the case. Television gets pumped into your house down an aerial, like water into a shower head.

You do not need that aerial to watch films, so obviously we need not bother with that bit, and modern televisions have got an automatic button for watching things on Amazon or Netflix.

The man put some special films on that were especially made to make you want to buy a television.

I was especially enchanted with the one with a metal thing rippling in the dark.

Even though it was night time you could still see every tiny bead.

There was a beautiful blue ocean and a spoon with honey dripping off it and some African wildebeests.

We gawped like peasants watching a coronation.

There was a special noise bar to make all of your neighbours cross with you. It made the music and the thundering sound as if it was happening right in the core of your very soul.

We were entranced.

We staggered out into the daylight with the newly-formed resolution to become television owners.

We talked all the way home about how we might afford it. There are two ways in which we could do it. We could either borrow it from Curry’s and give them the money a little bit at a time, whilst all the time spoiling our happy life by filling it with terrible agonised sleepless nights, thinking about the bank.

The other choice is to save up for it, unless the Peppers win the lottery, at which so far they have been rubbish.

We are going to save up, which is why I am on the taxi rank right now.

The picture is Mark and the dresser, this afternoon.