Luddite Blog (4 August 2006)

I’m sure I’m doing this wrong! Handwriting my blog? Can’t be right?! Still there’s bit & bobs I want to say & writing them down makes sense. And I can copy type reasonably quickly!


I could always bring the laptop, but then I’d have to get WiFi (or whatever), and then I’d play Solitaire & email friends & browse on eBay and it would be no different to home! And that’s so not what we want. Not having TV & computer makes it a proper holiday for us. You hear the sounds of the countryside, and go for walks in the evening or visit with neighbours or read or sit *in front of the fire by candlelight/outside the house watching the sun set (*delete as appropriate, depending on time of year). It’s much more relaxing than watching telly!

When I met David, I’d got rid of the TV licence – first I got rid of the cable (when I worked out how much it was costing per hour for the ½ - 2 hours a week I watched seemed an easy choice to make; especially as I was broke at the time: not all London wages are huge! My brother was earning more as a builders’ labourer in Staffordshire!). After Sky One & UK Gold had gone, I couldn’t even find ½ an hour a week to watch, so saving over £100 on the TV licence was easy. Telly to cellar. For a week or so it was weird, not having the moving wallpaper & noise for company, but then it got really easy – listening to CDs whilst doing yoga/stretch for those evenings I didn’t go out. I didn’t miss it at all and was fit & relaxed.

I used to get the reaction from some people: “you don’t have a telly – how sad!”. From a 15 year-old boy that seems perfectly reasonable, but from women in their 20s to me that seemed sad (and not in a “Loser!” kind of way’ genuinely sad in the old context). TV is the focus of so many people’s lives… Whereas I had a social life & did exercise!

I’m sure some people won’t like it here without telly or Playstation, but those people aren’t necessarily relaxing to be around, are they?

Which brings me to crickets. If you’re sitting indoors, you’re not outside watching the evening primroses “ping” open at dusk, so you miss the falling-light changeover from swallows to bats and as the light fails you’d miss the sound of the crickets. Now that would be sad! Nearly as sad as not being able to watch the lizards lifting their feet when the sunbathing gets too hot…