My First Blog

Oh Hello Blog. Nice to meet you. I wondered how long it would take us to find one another given my huge propensity for chat and sharing of my views with anyone who'll listen, (particularly those who only listen) and your renowned aptitude for listening. We were made for each other.

Today I got rid of my television. Well actually, it was not my television but a really shiny, swanky, rented one with forty million sky channels and ten trillion pixels. A television which had a room built around it with a sexy leather sofa and a media wall to contain the DVDs we would watch, the PS2 I don't know how to operate and the books we had long given up hope of getting around to reading. After a life long love affair with soap opera and late night trashvision, not to mention the mind bendingly bad daytime shows, Loose Women and Deal or No Deal which have sucked me in during a recent spell of maternal confinement, I have challenged myself to go without a goggle box. This has not been an easy move to make and it was certainly not a concept that has been easy to sell to my Sport and News loving Husband. However this has not been an easy year and having had just about all of our pre conceptions of what a person can and can't live without challenged, in the end a conversation about what it would be like to strip away the things we really don't need and see what is left we decided to ditch the Philips flat screen first and see what follows. Maybe mobile Phones and Facebook profiles although let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It's not just about taking things away though, it's about putting things back. In my childhood I would not have dreamed about a time when I would not sit at a diner table every night and sort the day out with my family over a long supper and indeed we would sit long beyond supper and enjoy each others company, this was an important convention which my parents decided upon at the genesis of our Family and I loved it then and have missed it since I left home eleven years ago. Now I am married and have my own small but evolving family and I am ashamed to admit that for several years the dining table has been relegated to the division of special occasions and entertaining and has been denied it's pride of place, the honour of being the scene of the nightly family head to head. Instead we have watched countless hours of television very little of which I can remember in detail and eaten our suppers (almost exclusively but lovingly cooked by me) pointed at whatever was on. As a couple we have always had very busy lives for many years living in London where we would go out often with friends, together on dates and frequently with colleagues for work purposes or the post office razzle. My work took place in a very social environment with music and chat and so our rare evenings at home were often about a bowl of something hot and homey in front of the telly and shutting out the rat race. Then we moved to the countryside for our grown up life and although we have certainly walked more, baked more, slept more and stayed in more than ever before we have also continued to increase the quantity of television we consume and I have just started to feel a little bit like we have been wasting ourselves and the precious hours of our life and unexplored potential with which we may or may not have been blessed.

There is a stick that has broken the back of this proverbial camel. We had a baby in April. A small one who came into our lives in a startling way delivering to us a host of challenges which I'm sure I will blog plenty about in the future but whose part in this post is thus. In her developmental 7 month health check she was tested for the ability to look for something if it is dropped or taken away, up until 7 months generally if a baby drops something it's as if it doesn't exist to the baby any longer, like the theory of the cat in the box. My Daughter failed this element of the test, she does not look for a dropped handkerchief nor biscuit or even favourite squeaking giraffe, No, But turn her away from the flickety flick of anything on the television and she will crane her neck indignantly like a cartoon owl (sometimes shrieking) to fix her gaze some more on Noel Edmonds. This will simply not do. I just don't want her to be a square eyed Millennial child. I want her to be unspoilt by drivel at least for the short while that her life and health is under my jurisdiction and so we have removed the TV from her life and I hope that tomorrow she will have forgotten it ever existed.

Having said all of this, I have during the writing of this post discovered my Husband lying in the bath, imagining himself cunningly hidden, watching an unspeakably awful american sitcom on his ipod through headphones and chuckling. So I accept that I can't control the man child all the time but at least he cooked me Penne alla Arabiata tonight which we ate on our trusty old dining table while conducting a proper sorting out the day conversation while our baby slept without pre bed time overstimulation. Perhaps, oh please, tomorrow he'll read Peter Rabbit to his Little Girl. I can't hear him now so I expect he's watching sport highlights on the upstairs imac. Baby steps.