Friday, June 08, 2007

My life is a circle

The New Seekers once sangeth...

"All my lifes a circle,
Sunrise and sundown.
something, something something,
la,la,la,laaa,la,la-la"

What ?

The New Seekers ?
Piss off.

It wasn't me that liked them it was, erm, someone I knew.
Yes there is a New Seekers album in the loft.

Anyway,
All my life's a circle.

Its is, I've been here before.

In 1977 I was asked to work oop north by my boss, oop north in our Newcastle office, for two weeks.

20 years old, company van to keep, expenses paid, I grabbed his hand off.
Then in the first of the two weeks they closed the Leeds office without warning, made everyone redundant and forgot about me oop in Newcastle - Newcastle boss says I can stay and he'd pay my lodging allowance - excellent says I.

That was the start of five straight years of living in cheap boarding houses and rooms above pubs, lots of stories, lots of experiences, good and bad times, times I laughed till I cried, times I cried till I couldn't cry no more, five years that I'm happy to have partook in and more mellowed for the experience.

Apart from watching tv.

The thing with living in digs is that other people live in digs with you and there is always only one tv in the common room towatch - it might be different now, maybe contractors digs have tv's in every room now but they didn't when I was there, you had one tv in the common room and you all shared it.

Which in practice meant that the first one back to the common room after the evening meal got to choose what the rest of you were going to watch for the rest of the night and because it was usually the biggest and hairy-est of the blokes in the digs you never argued and never asked if you could switch it to another channel.

So I'd sit there and watch someone elses choice of tv every night, for five years.

And now it happens all over again.

Since moving to this smaller house we've cut down on the number of tv's, we were turning into tv addicts, not that we watched too much (which we did) but that we collected them in every room int he house, we counted six tv sets when we cleared the old house out so we gave two of them away and now we only have one downstairs.

And the females commandeer it every night and it doesn't matter what I want to watch, they won't let me.

And now that Big Brother is back on tv I have given up the medium in total.

My life is a circle, I'm living in digs again, watching someone else's tv.

Its just that this time I pay the mortgage and the cable subscriptions.

"All my lifes a bastard,
Sunrise and sundown.
something, something something,
la,la,la,laaa,la,la-la"

No comments: