A TELLYDAY

Saturday turned into what I can only describe as a “tellyday” if I’m being perfectly honest with you. One of those days where nothing much else gets done and we merely spend all of our time vegetating in front of the idiot box, recharging our batteries and wondering why we never actually seem to get anything done.

Granted for one reason or another it had been a long and wearying week and, in many ways, we deserved to have a day of doing not very much, even though we know that we are very, very lucky to have the freedom to actually do so. The demands upon our time might very well be just as complicated as anyone else’s but we are at liberty to procrastinate and, occasionally, procrastination is what we do best.

Especially on a chilly pre-winter’s day when we’re both fatigued as hell.

Still, I didn’t plan for the day to turn out that way, it just sort of “happened…”

Mind you, I wasn’t “fatigued” enough to manage anything resembling a “long lie-in” or anything like that. After lying in bed fretting for a couple of hours, eventually I got myself up and brewed the kettle to jump start the day with the usual prescription pills which keep me alive so that I can do this kind of pointless activity. After that, I headed up to the keyboard only to find that, once again, as it has been quite regularly lately, the “inspiration cupboard” was empty and, after tapping away pointlessly for a little while, I grabbed a DVD off the shelf and went off for a bit of a watch.

Intriguingly, I made the choice of what to watch extraordinarily swiftly, so it was obviously something that had been bubbling away in my personal zeitgeist as something that I really fancied watching… which was an episode of “The Avengers” from the year when Diana Rigg first appeared in it and it was made on film in Black and White.

I didn’t even spend any time perusing which episode I’d like to spend my time with (it was “The Thirteenth Hole” which involves diabolical masterminds and scheming shenanigans happening on and around a golf course – perhaps it was the Ryder Cup what did it…?), which is unusual when it comes to the tricky matter of “episode selection” and “limited time opportunities”. Quite often I head upstairs fully intending to fill that spare hour with an episode of “The Sweeney” only to head back downstairs disc-less as I can’t pick which episode to use that hour up with.

After watching “The Thirteen Hole” I started to feel a bit guilty about the fact that much of series two of “The Outer Limits” remains unwatched, (after all, I’ve had those “Avengers” discs for years), so I popped the latest episode of that into the player and another hour passed (Watching “Behold, Eck!” for anyone who cares about such details...) as I waited for the household to surface.

Over breakfast we decided to “watch something” and I suggested the discs that were still lurking around and gathering dust that had arrived from the online disc rental company a good fortnight ago containing nine episodes of a series which we “hadn’t yet been in the mood for” and so I popped disc one of series two of “Justified” into the player and we resurfaced nine episodes later because it’s bloody brilliant.

After eating, the long evening still lay ahead of us, as did the air of weariness, and so we perused the dark and murky waters of whatever was still clogging up the DVR only to find that we’d been recording the last series of “The Closer” since the beginning of July and hadn’t watched any of it yet, and so the evening passed with four of those until it was time for bed.

Perhaps that might all seem like a colossal waste of time to the outside observer, and, of course, they may well be very right about that, but, you know, when you’ve worked hard all week, sometimes you do what you need to do and, to coin another phrase, this is what we do…