This weekend, I moved from my zhoozh fully furnished apartment with jaw-droppingly amazing view of the Sydney harbour (to go with discounted R4 500 weekly rent) to a slightly less expensive, less zhoozh apartment with a slightly less spectacular view of Mosman Bay marina.
It was a painful experience, largely because I moved my worldly goods and chattels without the assistance of a vehicle or, indeed, another pair of hands. This meant that I could not carry very much at any one time, so, back and forth I walked, down the road to the new place. I must have done 15 trips down the steep, rutted hill, past the gently rotting squashed possum, along the pavement and past the ancient Mazda blotted with bird shit and decorated with a rude note left on the windscreen (after countless trips, I got the “Park in your own backyard” part, but the rest made no sense at all), then across the road just before the sharp corner and past the jasmine and the abandoned portable TV, round the corner past the Golf and then across under the fig tree.
I wonder if anyone noticed.
At the end of the day, I was really looking forward to a hot bath and a bit of quality vegging in front of the TV. Only to discover that I can’t receive a signal. (Well, obviously not: I meant my TV can’t receive a signal.) The aerial socket in the new apartment, which is actually a bit Seventies and sad, appears to be stuffed, and I couldn’t shove the socket in firmly enough to receive anything more than a sort of abstract expressionist version of the road-cycling event in Beijing.
So, on Saturday night, I found myself sans bed and sans TV. Long story short, I didn’t have the energy to schlep across the bay to fetch the mattress in a box I’d bought from Dealsdirect.com.au (the cheapest mattress I could find), and my Ikea delivery had been postponed for the second time. I spent a very uncomfortable night wrapped in my duvet on the floor; it was like camping, only indoors, with the unearthly shrieks of the fruit bats feeding in the fig tree providing appropriately outdoorsy sound effects.
But it was the lack of TV that really, really depressed me. Oh, I have a growing collection of DVDs, much of Australiana or classics on sale at irresistible prices. But for some reason, I wanted TV. Real TV. Crappy free-to-air stuff full of annoying ads and five channels to flick through. Oddly comforting background noise, with news at predetermined intervals.
That’s what I wanted, more than anything else.
And it struck me as a little bit odd. We’re supposed to want everything on demand, right? Tivo and PVR have changed the world; no more fitting in with the scheduling whims of some faceless corporate wage slave, not so? And yet it was the routine, the dullness, the sense of progression from one hour to the next I wanted. British crime drama on ABC1 (no ads), Olympics on Seven, schlock on Nine and Ten, Rockwiz on SBS, the multicultural channel that features Danish cop dramas on Thursday nights.
I wanted to fit into someone else’s routine. I wanted to be part of a larger world going about its business without any particular concern about what I happened to be up to. I wanted the annoying ads, I wanted to whinge about the lack of choice.
I missed TV. In a world of 24-hour, all-you-can-eat entertainment, I wanted a bit of comfort food.
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