Cut off, cut free

Following a busy first half to the week where I was getting back late and effective going straight to my slumber each evening, I've found that I've continued the rest of the week without any desire to the watch the TV. I haven't seen a single programme since I was at my parents' last week. Not for thirty minutes have a sat before the box and passively and accepted its audio-visual offerings to me. There's something rather satisfying about the whole process too, as although it's unintended it feels as if it's become something active, this withdrawing from being subservient to the cathode ray tube master.

This all said, I'm no telly addict. Yet as TV seems to feature so formidably in popular daily life, in office conversation and within the pages of newspapers, it nevertheless feels as something of an achievement. This bodes well for me in the months ahead, as I shall be long in foreign lands and perhaps only occasionally coming into contact with some comprehensible media, likely even then to be limited to the authoritive tones of the BBC World Service or some exported British broadsheet. Casting aside the media hubbub for a week makes me confident that doing the same for some months won't prove to be much of challenge.

Let us not forget also that the television is there as a entirely non-demanding medium, ideal at the end of a long tiring day in the office when the brain is ground down by 8 hours of bombardment and is not capable of much. Wandering foreign lands I suspect while tiring in itself will leave a quite different legacy on the mind. Far from shut down, the brain will be reeling from the sights, sounds and experiences of the day.