No I haven't been replaced by a pod person - well may you ask what I'm talking about, and where have I been? Ok - if you haven't been following my FB updates, we were meant to spend three weeks in Italy but caught up in all the snow related 'fun' at Heathrow. Holiday got canned. Luggage lost for three weeks - various unrepeatable comments about Bristish Airways. I've been trying to push through various books for my thesis, and have neglected posting here.
That still doesn't explain the above title.
Let's talk TV. Or rather, the lack of a TV.
I don't think its any great secret that I'm a TV addict - my preaching and writing is usually liberally scattered with various pop culture references from TV. But since moving into our current abode in England - no TV. This has been deliberate - you have to pay £145 pounds for a TV licence EVERY YEAR!!! That's on top of the cost of the TV itself.
But more than that, we made the decision not to get a TV because of our daughter Aly. Because we don't have a TV in the house, it's really interesting if I take her to the Keenan House Common room - if other kids have the TV on there she just sits and gets this vacant look on her face - kids don't evaluate what they watch, it just soaks in.
Apart from killing imaginative play, the real danger here is in branding. Go and watch a movie or commercial TV show - and play the game 'Spot the product placement'. No joke - count how often Coke, Starbucks, or whatever makes an appearance. Companies wouldn't do this if it didn't work. Aly sits and reads, or plays with her toys. She makes her own games (including a disturbing sequence in which she cooked the holy family from our nativity scene and fed them to her Teddy Bear...). The adults talk. You get used to having silence in the house and not needing background noise. We get to make good head way with our hobbies - Em's turned into a knitting MACHINE, and I've been painting a large number of models for Warhammer 40K (at present I've done up a unit of 30 Choppa Boys, 20 Shoota Boys, 20 Choppa Boys, 1 Deff Dread, and 3 Killa Kans).
Which leads me to a thought hither to unimagined... No TV when we get back home to Australia.
No.
Really.
I'm not joking.
I may even trim back my DVD collection.
Any way - back to the thesis.
Cheers - Guerin
