Our cable decoder is broken. It’s a rather grim state of affairs, actually, as it won’t be fixed until next week at the earliest. When it first went, it just made all the channels look like a piss-poor second-generation VHS copy. With each passing day, the picture gets slightly worse, and it’s now almost unwatchable.

No doubt by the time the engineer comes to look at it, it will have approached the quality of the worst TV picture I have ever tried to watch for any extended period of time, during my attempts to watch the England – Argentina match during the 1998 world cup finals while working in the states. The only channel that we could even remotely get that was showing it amounted to little more than moving blobs of fuzz. I could almost hear the commentary though. In Spanish. Surprisingly, I managed to just about follow what was going on for most of the game, although I did have to phone home for updates during the penalty shoot out.

Losing TV does have some advantages, though. Not in a “Why Don’t You…” turn off the TV and do something more interesting instead sense, but rather in that we have rediscovered the house’s collective DVD collection. Already we’ve watched
Crouching Tiger, Gladiator and Moulin Rouge this week. I’d forgotten how good those films were, actually.