That kind of “Oh Dear”

Monday November 12, 2007

I haven’t been able to keep to my resolution on Northern Exposure. One episode an evening, I promised myself. Hah!

The trouble is that Dolly loves it, too. Most of the day and night she spends curled up on my dining chair in the kitchen, shifting almost graciously when I want to sit down to eat. Somewhere between seven and eight in the evening she comes padding in to the study and yowls at me. I check first to see if she’s after a drink from the tap even though it’s not really her time of day for drinking.

“Ah. It’s telly time is it, Dolly?”

She gives a big sigh and walks over to the staircase, looking over her shoulder to be sure I’m following, and we grunt and groan our way up to the living room together and the die is cast for the next two hours. Two episodes of Northern Exposure for the two of us and two glasses of cheap plonk for me. Dolly has yet to acquire a taste for wine.

When Graham’s home he comes to join the party, laptop under his arm, and so we all three of us sit happily in a netherworld somewhere between Somerset and Alaska.

Then I come down to the kitchen to fix our dinner and, somewhere between lining up the components and preparing the veggies, Dolly comes back down to reclaim her place on my chair.

So.  Dolly likes Northern Exposure. I’m living in hope that she’ll remember and appreciate Tales of the City, too, because we have a full DVD set of that to enjoy in much the same way, seeing the winter nights away and looking forward to another up sticks and move operation some time in the New Year.

I’m still not at liberty to discuss the whys and wherefores of the move, I’m afraid.  Walls have ears and, as I’m wont to say, some of them have over-hasty mouths, too. It’ll not be long now before I can cast the kimono completely aside.

Last thing yesterday, Graham fixed up our new slim-line, all-function, multi-zone DVD player, setting the old original one aside. Only six years old but still working like a good ‘un.

“We can take that down to the dump tomorrow,” he said.

“We most certainly can not. I’ll put it up on Freecycle first thing.”

“Nobody will want that. It’s a piece of junk.”

“We’ll see.”

I’m waiting in this morning for the bloke who came back to me within 15 minutes of posting the dear old machine.

“Told you,” I said.

“Nah, nah, nah nah nah.”

“Precisely.”

Oh, I do love being right.

There’s one snag with the new machine. It has an inter-gobblety-gookely feature which re-interpolates the data on the DVD discs, optimising the picture and audio. To check it out, Graham played the Northern Exposure disc we’d watched earlier. Bad choice.

The difference is astonishing, almost like the quality improvement given by HDTV over standard TV. There was Cicely, sharper and clearer than I’ve ever seen it before.

“Oh Dear,” I said.

“What Oh Dear?”

“I think we may have to go back to the beginning and watch it all over again.”

“Ah. That kind of Oh Dear.”