I miss some telly stuff.

Is it a DVR or PVR? I hate this new part of technology, where we can’t call it the old thing (the video. I’ve taped something) but no-one has yet decided what the new thing even is. For many months it has been the PVR for me but I have realised that although it is programmable I actually don’t do any programming, and what really is a video? DVR is mildly better, the digital video recorder, but it still doesn’t blow my skirt up.
Either way, it was broken.

So last month I had the most outrageously tense few weeks of my young(ish) life as the PC under the telly broke. I was literally devoid of television, it was like losing a lung or a leg or a...pair of shoes, I don’t know.

I quickly realised that much like mobile phones causing you to know precisely none of your important phone numbers, including your own, that the automated process of recording an entire series had rendered me an impotent part of the telly-watching process. I didn’t know when any of my programmes were on.

Weirdly, I didn’t even know what programmes I watched each week, for they just appeared on a regular basis. I switch to the DVR and there they all are, a mass of favourites just waiting for me to find the time to sit down and watch them.

So quickly, a new way of living inveigles its way into your life and becomes apparently indispensible. It amazes me how quickly we adapt to such things – it wasn’t that long ago that I was at university with my VCR, watching cassettes I’d picked up from the local charity shop and visiting friends with a telly when I wanted to watch something live.

And now, well the world is my oyster. Until that world comes crashing down and I don’t even know where it is. Or what oysters are.

Odd, that.