A lot of people gasp with shock when I tell them we have no t.v.

“Did you see blah blah blah last night…?”

“Nope. Haven’t got a television.”

“What??!!”

I do caregiving for a living, so I stay for two days and two nights in a house each week. But even then I’m still not tempted to stare at the goggle-box. Unless there’s a good documentary on, or Bones – about the only drama I like to see regularly, because her autistic-type personality has a train-smash sort of fascination to it, and the other characters make me laugh. The other exception being America’s Next Top Model, but that’s because I like watching the photo shoots that they come up with. In between the shoots (when they’re bitching at each other about who should be doing the dishes or what a cow so-and-so is) I usually wander off and hand out meds or empty catheter bags or something else so much more fascinating.

It’s no hardship though, having no t.v. We do have the internet, after all, which can keep us amused for hours. Any question you can possibly come up with, Google will find an answer to it somewhere. Which is how I know that steam rollers don’t roll steam…

But the best thing we have is the outside world. When you don’t live in a house, you tend to live so much closer to Nature. So every time you traipse across the way to use the toilet in the utility area, you tend to look up at the stars along the way. And when you’re having an outside fire, you tend to flame-gaze – something we humans have been doing for millennia – and swap stories. That’s what we used to do before televisions came along – tell our own stories. Now they do it for us.

You take a lot more notice of the little beings around you too. When a wee bird flies into your awning, you to stop and have a chat with it. You also name the hedgehogs. And you get to know all your resident spiders quite intimately – watching them skydive on their silken threads, or build a new web, then going all gooey over their babies ‘cos they all look just like their mama…

You know when autumn is coming because you have to dodge falling chestnuts while hanging out the washing (helmets are recommended – them thur trees get quite tall) and sweep all the leaves out of your awning over and over. You know what the moon cycle is because it makes the difference between carrying a torch or not when you are walking to the toilet in the dark. And you know when it’s winter because the ice comes…

We don’t have snow in this part of New Zealand (North) but the South Islanders very kindly send us up a taste of what they’re getting by way of a Southerly wind – bitterly cold and reeking of snow without the fun part. They keep the snow for themselves, selfish blighters! So yesterday morning, after huddling away from a particularly fun cold snap the night before, had us running around looking at all the ice it had left behind. And me looking like a madwoman in my dressing gown bending in all sorts of positions to take photos of it. As you do, when you haven’t got a television…

Exhibit A: The bird bath –

 

To hell with dignity, I say!

Then we marvelled at this lot for a while. So much so, we actually forgot to make the coffee. I know, right??!!

I’m going to stop here and see if you can guess what this ice was sitting on. I’ll leave it for a day or two and see if anyone can figure it out. Send in your ideas of what you think it is. Go on, indulge me – I haven’t got a television.

* Days later –

This is where the ice came from – the tops of our rubbish bins.

Yeah, I know – small things amuse small minds. 😀