We went to our friends' house last night to see the New Year in with a few other mutual friends. After a barbeque and dessert, a mildly energetic game of table tennis (which I didn't participate in because of the current lack of decent mobility), we finished up playing Absolute Balderdash, a game in which you not only have to guess the correct answer to a subject but also have to invent your own answer in order to fool the other players. I quite enjoyed it, although with eight of us playing it was perhaps a bit slower than it might have been.
We don't often play board games or card games or any other kind of similar games these days. The tv stands in the place of board games these days. But it's not actually watched as much as it thinks it is. In fact, it hasn't realised that it's gone from being a product of entertainment to something that's the equivalent of a warm fire burning in the background. Most of television can be ignored, especially since the advent of reality shows that are virtually all the same and are tediously edited to show up people in the worst possible light.
I'm not as good at ignoring it as many of my family are; my wife was brought up in a time and place when televisions were on all day and quickly became a kind of noise in the background. Being a person who's always been keen on movies, I find it harder to act as if the tv wasn't there, especially if I'm trying to read. I prefer to read away from its insistent irritating blather. But I certainly ignore it far more readily than I used to, and that's a plus.
There may come a day when television stations realise that no one's actually watching any more and they'll just put on a picture of a log fire, or some slow-moving scenic panorama, and the tv will finally have found its true home...
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