Viewers

I have got myself into the most terrible flap.

It has been a worrying sort of evening.

I wanted to start writing this ages ago, and didn’t, and now I am rushing to do it in ten minutes before dinner. Already it is almost nine o’clock, and I am longing for wine.

The thing is that after wine I write rubbish and so I am resisting the urge until I have finished.

You will be pleased to hear that the new television has arrived.

It is the most terrifying device on the surface of the planet.

It is razor-blade thin and steely shiny, and completely incomprehensible.

Even getting it out of the box was nerve-scrapingly, agonisingly difficult. We had to ease the box cautiously over the top of the screen and not touch the fragile object that slid into view. This was in case it snapped, which the instructions warned that it might.

It is like having a huge, brittle, wafer-thin ice sheet in the front room. It looks as though it might disintegrate into a million bits just at the tiniest tap.

We have not yet managed to stick it to the wall, because the small set of meccano girders ordered for the purpose has not yet arrived. Instead it is sitting on the top of the drawers, swaying slightly.

Lucy has programmed it. This was terrifyingly difficult because of being desperate not to let it hunt for television channels by accident. If it decided to catch hold of some passing BBC out of the ether, we would never be able to persuade it to let go, and then we would be stuck with having to pay a licence fee for terrible dross that we never wanted to watch anyway.

We had to try, calmly and quietly, just to let it hunt through the cyber-universe until it found Amazon Prime and its collection of films.

In the end she managed it, as we fielded our way through lots of questions that we really didn’t understand, like whether or not we wanted it to be on the ethernet. I do not know what an ethernet is but that does not mean that there is not one, in today’s peculiar high-tech living rooms. It could be flapping around under the stairs for all I know, or sitting, quietly invisible and detectable only to brilliant new televisions, on the office desk.

By the time we had unpacked it, and put it on the side, and persuaded it to talk to Amazon, I was almost sick with the worry of it and so have come upstairs to write to you for a little break.

I do not know if this purchase has been a good idea after all.

On the positive side, however, Mark’s taxi has passed its MOT, and I have cleaned the bathroom. Both these events seem to me to be occasions for celebration. Better still, both grown-up daughters have telephoned home with small celebrations of their own, and I suppose that not hearing from Oliver is probably good news.

Lucy is still contemplating trying to purchase a house, an activity which is made slightly more complicated by not having any money. I have assured her that this has never stopped me from doing anything in the past, and that if she wants something badly enough she will probably find a way.

Indeed, she seems to have taken this advice to heart, and has spent her day busily investigating financial websites with terrifying clauses secreted in the impossibly tiny writing of their Terms And Conditions giving them a claim to her firstborn child, eighty percent of everything she ever earns, and probably Prima Nochta as well.

I expect she just clicked Agree anyway.

Roger Poopy has spent his day on an elongated play-date with Pepper, and has collapsed in front of the fire in a state of blissful contentment. He did not even care about his dinner.

LATER NOTE.

We have watched it, and it is beyond wonderful.

That is to say, the television is beyond wonderful. We actually watched some unutterable drivel about Vikings that seemed to have been written by the scriptwriters from The Archers, and which was nonsense from the first blood-curdling high fidelity sound battle shriek.

The television was so magnificent that the plot did not matter.  We kept wanting to stop it so that we could look at the majestic sweeps of crystal-clear scenery, at the heaving waters and the stunning mountains.

The picture was so clear that you could see where the make up department had tried to hide people’s spots.

It is going to be the most amazing thing. We are going to watch it every week, it will be like having our very own cinema.

Indeed, it was better than Bowness cinema, where the picture wobbles sometimes, and where more than once we have had to go home halfway through because the projector has broken.

We don’t have to listen to the Wurlitzer organ first either.

Have a boring picture of a view of the Lake District.