Full Flavour Behaviour!

Eleven.. eleven..
15.i.05

Well, here I am tidying my flat. I meant to break it to you that bluntly; it was for comic effect. Technically, of course, I am not actually tidying right this second because I'm posting in my blog about how amazing it is that I'm tidying. Which is ironic, when you think about it, because me stopping tidying to go on the Internet and talk about myself is about as amazing as a cheese sandwich.

Anyway; I should point out that there is a reason behind this tidying; I had to make room for a new addition to the flat. The more perspicacious among you will have noticed already what this addition is but that doesn't stop me pointing it out here: Mark and I have bought a new telly. The old one, a 12 inch manual-tune nightmare with a very noisy transformer and no remote, finally had its final morning of use (well, I say morning..) today. It was an impulse purchase, as is so often the case, brought on partly by my feeling flush after sending out an invoice and partly by the sale at Powerhouse, a white goods store we only visited because we were in town buying network cable at B&Q next door.

It occurred to me to start this entry with an apology, a big moaning session and finally an admission that I was wrong to berate my Dad for buying a similar gadget a year or so ago but when I composed the first line ('Years ago I swore I'd never buy a TV..') and realised it was a lie, I decided against such an approach. I mean, quite honestly I have nothing personal against television. Yes, watching it is pointless and sucks up your time and no, I didn't miss it at all in Swazi. Yet watching movies and playing split-screen driving games is actually frustrating on a small screen - it requires such effort, in fact, that the stress entirely negates any relaxation or entertainment afforded and so I think this is, while not exactly a wise investment, probably not a total waste of money.

We happened across it while drooling over the flat screens; tucked in behind the £1,500 TFTs was an entire wall of old tube tellies. It was astonishingly cheap - £230 - unthinkable for a 28" self-tuning wide screen only a few years ago. We considered briefly the 32" version for only £50 more but it wasn't a flat tube. Now, I've always had a certain cynicism about flat tubes and thought them just a poor man's version of a TFT. However, they do look better and it was only after talking to the salesman that I realised what it is.. they don't reflect as much. Of course, they do - they're made of glass just like the curved tubes - but they don't suck in light from all angles like a lens because they're flat. Only incident light that is directly reflected towards you is visible over the picture, rather than everything within 179 degrees of the front of the TV.

The first thing, of course, was to wire it all up to the Hi-Fi and plug in Mark's new Playstation. I was damned if I was going to spend a ton on half a TV only for the first thing I saw on screen to be Dot Cotton folding some EastEnders laundry so we booted up the 'station and batted around Grand Valley Speedway a few times to get it worn in.

Marvellous.

I just hope that, now we have a television worth watching (with teletext!), I won't slip into watching it all the time. So far, so good though; I enjoyed watching the movie so much earlier that I've switched it off to tidy up and talk to you guys. Plus, the flat is sparkling!

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