I was driving Fred Ex home from school today and I was feeling very twitchy and I couldn’t immediately determine why.  Surely it couldn’t be that I had been interrupted by work while on a day off, could it?

Have you ever seen this sign on a TV?  Quesera hasn’t either

No. This is something far more serious.  Our TV is broken and last night was hauled away by a repair man who said gravely, in response to my query as to how long it would be before we knew whether it could be salvaged, that “it could be a week or 10 days, but really you can’t be watching it anyway what with the radiation coming from the damaged picture screen”.

The fucking WHAT???  Since when is uranium a component of domestic appliances?

So I spent all of last night repeatedly saying to Chip “do you think we have been exposed to radiation?  Do you think we should go and get tested?”

Though for what precisely and where we could be tested I am not sure.  Fred Ex overheard and said:  ”if we’ve been exposed to radiation that means we are going to get cancer and die doesn’t it?”  ”Well, at least we were doing something we love”, I wanted to respond but didn’t think this would comfort him much.

My persistent questioning about the potential radiation exposure is because, really, I am feeling rather guilty about the whole thing.  I had decided that for once I was not going to take responsibility for getting something fixed and was trying to make a point to Chip that he has to take on organisational responsibility for something around the house – for something that the entire family holds so dear.  That does not involve, I don’t know, erecting a card table for his Gran Turismo game, by way of example.

This lack of TV is critical for me.  I watch so much of it and I use the IQ/TiVo rewind function so frequently, that I now instinctively try and hit replay when we are at the movies or when I am listening to the radio.  Sometimes I want to do it with real life people as well.  When I questioned Chip tonight about whether he does this too, he said “no I thought you were making that bit up”. So perhaps I am on my own in reflexively trying to rewind people.

The whole fuckery started a few months ago when the TV started to take a while to “warm up”.  Like in the 70s and 80s when you would turn your TV on and it was the natural order of things that it would take a while to get its shit together and produce a focussed picture.

It was Other Jackie who coined the phrase “warm up” as it pertained to our TV.  She had come over and I was trying to show her some TV show Fred Ex and I had been on and she said after about 10 minutes of waiting – “Quesera, it is like an olden days TV.  What are you going to do?”

And I did precisely nothing.  Just to prove a point.

This made for very difficult TV viewing.  Sometimes we would have only one quarter of the screen, on the left had side, and if anyone were in the other three quarters we would have to rely solely on their voices to try and divine what the fuck was going on.  It was even harder if the actors were African-American (actually anyone even slightly darker skinned), and I spent a large amount of time shouting at the screen “Dr Benton (brilliant yet wilful surgeon at County General on ER), stage left STAGE LEFT”. In retrospect, quite possibly the TV had some sort of 21st century racist KKK thing going on and we are best rid of its malevolent presence, even without its radiation emitting qualities.

Some nights it would come good and we were too frightened to turn it off, so we left the TV on all night and day, just so it would be there when we got home.  I am just hoping it wasn’t emitting radiation even when it was in a good mood.

Fonzie - picture him with a 44 inch Sony Bravia - and you have Chip* (*actual Chip may not resemble pictures)

Then Chip figured out a way to get it going – a sort of bang on the screen, Fonzie style, to get us more than 25% of the picture.  But after a few weeks even this would no longer work.

So we were reduced to relying on a temperamental TV that, for no apparent reason, would, on random days, snap out of its sullen refusal to broadcast the whole picture – and we would be that excited.

Chip:  ”ooh the TV is working.  The whole screen”.

Quesera:  ”I am leaving the office right now”.

Other days it was like we were a 1940s family, sitting around listening to the wireless.  But as TV relies so much on, well, visual images, it was often very difficult to understand what the hell was going on.  I was reduced to watching only those shows with characters’ voices I knew intimately, so that I at least had an approximation of the action.

It also tolerated, possibly grudgingly, us watching animated shows – so I think I have seen all 24 seasons of The Simpsons in the past couple of months.  Unsurprisingly, Fred Ex enjoyed that immensely.

Then it dawned on me.  We were at a Mexican stand-off (though of course it would be next to impossible to watch it televised on TV, if it only involved Mexicans).

Chip was not going to organise it.  And as the vast majority of NBA players are African-American, I had to get it fixed otherwise I would never be able to see any basketball action, assuming the lock-out is finally resolved.

So now I am left with:  (1) no TV;  (2) the possibility that my determination to prove a point to Chip has lead us all to be exposed to radiation;  and (3) a recalcitrant Fred Ex who refuses to hand over the 10 inch TV – which I originally bought to watch the NBA at work.  In fact Fred Ex disappeared for 15 minutes after the TV repair man took the family TV away and I could hear noises from his bedroom which sounded distinctly like he was trying to hide the 10 inch TV to prevent me taking possession of it.

Seriously Chip? This is your attempt at a picture of a family assembled around a wireless? It is not like Quesera has ever LOVINGLY STROKED our KKK TV like these women are doing

Chip is insisting that we use this TV-less period to interact as a family, and has sought to prohibit computer use as well.  Fred Ex listened carefully to this proposition, then said “no thanks” and put his headphones on to keep watching TV on a computer.

Me?  I am particularly anxious.  I missed Beauty and The Geek last night and am desperate to know what has become of the newly made-over Bendeguz.  Plus we have missed an episode of The Amazing Race, a repeat of ER, a new episode of Law & Order: SVU and god knows what else we had on series-link recording.

And I can’t help but think:  my mistakenly praying to the patron saint of TVs, St Clare, when I thought she was the patron saint of the blind, has really come back to bite me.

Evidently that incident with Cat in the crypt of St Francis of Assissi’s Cathedral, talking about matters sexual, potentially involving Saint Clare, has not been overlooked and our racist TV has been turned against us.  Possibly with grave health consequences.