We put the TV back in the attic after Christmas after a December of over-dosing on the box. The children on episodes of Sophia the First, their father on football programmes of any description and me on re-runs of Don't Tell The Bride and Tattoo Fixers. (You might think you have no interest in a programme like Tattoo Fixers but watch one episode and then come back to me.)
We took the TV down for December as a test. Perhaps my fondness for Come Dine With Me had abated in the year since we banished the TV to the highest room in the house? The answer was no.
Besides, since we got rid of the TV somebody had gone and invented Couples Come Dine With Me which takes that programme to a whole other level so there was no hope for me really.
Now the telly is gone for another year and I am trying to go for regular walks instead of exercising my fingers with the remote control. And on these walks I’ve been transporting myself to somewhere else because the good cheer of Christmas faded far too fast. I am thinking of last year’s summer holidays. I am thinking of France.
I am thinking of the Eurocamp mobile home in Château des Ormes in Brittany where we barbecued and where I read seven books in the sunshine while the children did parkour and horseriding and learned badminton.
I half-heartedly pound the streets of the north inner city and I think about the little restaurant called Auberge we discovered where the sweetest platters of mussels were served and where the children’s menu is a plate of steamed hake with beurre blanc and vegetables. Where we ate sumptuous feasts for half of what it would have cost at home. Outside, while we dawdled over dessert, the children could feed rabbits and play on the swings as dusk fell.
I work up a sweat in the freezing cold of Dublin and I think of the sunsets and the trip to Dinan where we rented bikes and cycled around a lake. I take a rest on a grimy bench and I think about booking this year’s holidays and where we might go. Spurred on by faint memories of the late evening sun warming our faces I flit around the eurocamp.ie website and imagine climbing the steps to the water slide, a child clutching at my legs as we scream and laugh all the way to the bottom.
I didn’t grow up going “camping in France” although I do remember feeling jealous of the children in my class who did.
So I see our trips on Brittany Ferries to a campsite where you can go on a zipline and swim in a pool with pretend waves that emulate the sea every half an hour as some kind of social progress, of moving up in the world.
I never had a childhood holiday in a country where the sun shone with any consistency. We went west to a caravan or we went visiting relatives in rainy England. I don’t think I missed out. I had an uncle who lived in a thatched cottage in London who took us to Hamley’s toy shop which was another world.
Uncle Ron lives in Kent now. A place called Broadstairs. He writes a piece every couple of weeks for a local paper called The Broadie. His latest one is titled "Thoughts of an atheist in his 89th year".
I have finally accepted, I am in the midst of what is called middle age. Middle age dawned on me at Christmas when somebody mentioned that the song Last Christmas was 31 years old.
So even though I am still a way off my 89th year, I find myself reading Uncle Ron and his Monty Python parrot references and nodding: “Death is first and foremost an affront to my ego. It’s not the fear of eternal damnation that bothers me about dying, not even the terror of the unknown; it’s the ‘no more, ceased to be, extinct in its entirety, ex parrot’ bit that gets up my nose. How dare things go on as usual with me not there! How dare my great-grandchildren grow up, go to university, get married, have children themselves all without me!
“How dare people continue to conduct conversations without seeking my opinion! How dare there be newspapers and magazines and books and radio and television and the internet and the yet-to-be-invented forms of mass communication without my being in on them! How dare I not exist!”
I stride along in the rain, straight into middle age, thinking about the SAD therapy light you can get in Aldi, the cold cathode fluorescent tube which they say simulates the therapeutic effects of natural daylight. I think of Uncle Ron, still raging against the dying of the light and writing his thoughts on mortality at 88.
I am glad the TV is in the attic. There are pavements to be pounded. Lives to be living. Even the faintest memory of sunshine is a gift.