Postcards From Across the Pond

A couple of weeks ago, we bought a new telly, even though our old one was only two and a half years old. It wasn’t that it was out-dated or had stopped working, it was simply driving us crazy.

A few months after we brought it home, it began periodically turning off and needing to reboot itself (a process that could take as long as a minute and a half which, if you are in the middle of an episode of Shetland, is a long time). Additionally, it stopped recognizing our WiFi, which made it impossible to watch anything on catch-up. Our work around was to watch programs on our laptops.

When we moved into this flat, we had a different television, a smaller model that soon became too small for us to comfortably watch, which was why we bought the new one. I do not recall the old, smaller, less advanced telly having those problems. They seemed to start when we brought the new, updated one home. Another quirk I discovered when we moved into this flat, was that there were two antenna outlets (this matters later in our story), one had no signal but other worked fine. So, I plugged the telly into the working antenna port and attempted to remove the non-working one by taking the plate off the wall. Behind it I found a redundant cable that I was planning to cut flush with the wall and spackle over, but I never got around to it.

Another thing that continually annoyed me was, despite moving only 4,000 feet from our previous flat, our telly seemed to think we’d relocated to London. When the national newscaster would say, “and now let’s check the news and weather where you live,” we’d get the London news, at which point I’d shout, “I don’t live in London!” at the telly, nearly every time, for three years.

Then, at the end of May, we had fibre optic broadband fitted, giving us hope that this would solve our issues. But it didn’t. So, in desperation, we bought a new telly.

It bears mentioning that the new telly is a 32” model, just like the old one, because anything bigger would not fit in the space available for it. Although we were able to get one, the saleslady told us they are not making them in that size anymore because people want larger screens, which is not a problem yet, but it will be when we need a new telly.

Once home and installed, our new telly solved our problems. Kinda. It attached to the WiFi so we could watch catch-up without having to get our laptops out, but it still thought we lived in London, and it still went blank occasionally. However, when the new screen went blank, it did not reboot; it merely displayed a message saying there was no signal before returning to the program a few seconds later. This told me that the problem was not the telly, but the connection. With hope in my heart, I bought a new antenna cable and plugged it in, certain that the old one had to be faulty. It wasn’t. Which told us the problem was with the antenna, something we could do nothing about, which meant bringing in the professionals.

They came while I was manning the café at the nature reserve, leaving my wife to field all the technical questions. Long story short, twenty minutes and one hundred and twenty pounds later, they left, with the telly now plugged into the previously redundant wire, strict instructions for me to not touch it, and, happily, all our telly-watching problems solved. We now, once again, live in the South instead of London, and the telly no longer blacks out.

I am not sure why the redundant cable—that I am certain had no signal when we first moved in here—turned out to be the solution to our troubles, but I am not going to argue with it, and I am certainly not going to touch it.