Waiting for God

I am a long way beyond the I’m-going-to-live-forever illusion of my youth. If I live as long as my mum, I have ten years left and if I equal my dad’s record I have 16. It could be worse. If I had lived as long as my paternal grandfather, who shuffled off his mortal coil some three years before I was born, I might as well ring up Co-op funeral care as soon as I finish this blog, always assuming I live long enough to finish it. That said, the likelihood that I am deep into the final quarter of my life is not something that keeps me awake at night.

I know that I need to do more stuff, spend more time with family and friends, read more books and watch less television, the latter of which is causing brain-rot among many people who don’t already live in care homes as their brains rot.

I never watch TV soap shows, I do not watch daytime TV; in general, I watch far less TV than I used to. And trust me: I used to watch a lot of it. Hours of any old crap would wash over me until it was time to go to bed. It did two things. I watched stuff I wanted to see and it killed time. I lurched back into this habit during the lockdown years but, with that one exception, since the autumn of 2015, everything changed.

Visiting lonely isolated and lonely people in rural areas, pretty well every person had the TV on. It would sit in the corner, chatting away to itself, as lonely and isolated people waited for God. Life was basically Holly and Phil, Bargain Hunt and at least a million programmes about antiques, except that no one was actually watching. It was moving wallpaper. It was company. It was – is – shit.

Getting home after a day of visiting isolated and lonely people, what was the first thing I did? I’d put the telly on and watch brainless rubbish. Thinking far too much, I kept thinking, I’ll have plenty of time to do this when I am even older, dribbling even more and waiting for a God who isn’t there. It’s one thing wasting your life watching TV when you really can’t do anything else but when there are alternatives to watching Dion Dublin trudging around some rickety old house or some twattish couple who want to buy the holiday home of their dreams on the Costas among the wall-to-wall traditional English pubs, then I am going to find them.

Even if it’s something as nerdish as going to look at railway tunnels or watching planes take off at Adge Cutler international airport, it has to be of more intellectual value than Cash In The Attic (I had to Google for names of these shows) or the Alan Titchmarsh show.

It is likely that if somehow I live to be moderately old, these shows I now take the piss out of will be there to keep me company in my final days and years. For now, I am resolved to watch even less crap on TV.