When you get to my age, family members have great trouble finding presents to give to you for birthday and Christmas. The “old scientist” and I always have trouble finding something for each other and we have our birthdays within a week of each other. I’m always up for a book and he’s always up for a great bottle of wine, but mostly if we want something we go and buy it. Even the big stuff.

We’ve both been poor and I don’t use that word lightly, for it surely was true. We are both the first generation in our working class families to attend university and that gave us the ability, by dint of luck and hard work, to become, by our parents standards, wealthy although we don’t think of ourselves that way. However it is probably true, provided the stock market doesn’t crash completely.

Imagine my surprise when my son said to me before my birthday, which comes first in the line-up, ” S and V (my daughter and son-in-law) and I want to buy a big screen high definition TV for a combined birthday/Christmas present for you both.” What the heck? We can afford to buy it ourselves, for heaven’s sake. Apparently I had expressed a wish to have such a thing in passing some time ago and it was glommed onto by the devoid of ideas children. But it’s not that simple, there are complications with the set-up, you see, else I would already have done it, no doubt.

After several conversations with both of them, we felt obliged to go out and look at these things. Let me tell you, its stress factor is right up there with buying a new car, which I loathe intensely. Some friends had recently purchased a new set-up so I had conversations with them, read Consumer Reports and did online research before venturing forth, but it’s still a nightmare out there. However, after two very long exhausting days, visiting and revisiting six different electronic stores, listening to good salespeople and bad salespeople, we purchased a new Sony TV. As well we had to buy an expensive High Definition DVR recorder which decodes the signal and records programs in High Definition onto a 160GB hard drive, should you wish. They also threw in a “free” Blueray Disc DVD player, since Sony is trying to promote this technology which they invented over the rival HD system. The add-ons we will pay for ourselves. Well one was “free”. Yeah, right.

The next trick was to dismantle the perfectly good but not high definition TV-DVD-VCR set-up which we had before, and install the new lot. The old TV was housed in this teak entertainment centre in our family room. But of course the new one could not fit in the old space so is situated on top, involving looking up a little but it’s acceptable. So tra-la, you see the new TV in position on top of the old teak stand/bookshelf unit.


The old Video cassette recorder is still here, however the old DVD player and digital decoder box, along with the old TV have moved into our bedroom to replace the TV that was there, which is now homeless and will finally rest in my daughter’s old room or my son’s bedroom at his house, which will push his bedroom TV down the line to the recycling depot. So you see this was the start of a big reorganization, which involved the connection of many different cables (when is the truly wireless era arriving?) and the moving around of many books in the process.

Now did we need a new TV? Certainly not. Would we have bought one ourselves? Probably, sooner rather than later. After all we are getting on in years and can no longer wait for things to give up the ghost before we go for the new technology, as was our previous wont.
But what house really needs three television sets for two people, who don’t even watch a lot of TV on the whole? Why the same one that has three computers, well one really is out of date, and four stereo systems and eight telephones for the same two people. Consumerism personified.

So thank you, S and V and G. We are enjoying the new TV, although we haven’t quite mastered the three new remote controls and three thick manuals but I’m sure we’ll be on top of it all soon. I wonder if there’s anything worth watching.