27

There was a boy in my class at school who was famed for not having a tv. We'd talk about tv programmes and stuff and he didn't have a clue what we were on about. Nobody could believe it. Everyone thought he must have been really poor, so nobody questioned him about it.

Just before we started Year 10 he invited me over to his house. He wasn't poor at all. His house was massive. He took me into the living room and what I saw turned my world upside down. He had the biggest tv I had ever seen. It was like the size of a fully grown cow.

"I thought you didn't have a tv" I said.

"No" he said "Everyone thinks that, I just don't watch tv".

I asked him why, and he said that there were too many channels and programmes to choose from, and it wasn't fair on the ones he couldn't watch.
He made me a glass of lemonade and we sat down on the sofa.

"So what do you do instead then?" I asked.

"I just sit here and think about what might be on" he said.

So there we sat for the next three hours staring at the black screen. Every time I tried talking to him he told me to be quiet, because I was distracting him from his thinking. Every half hour or so, he would say a few words when he imagined that the adverts were on, but mostly we sat in silence.

When it came time to leave I asked him what he had imagined was on tv that evening. He described a film which had the exact plot of Speed 2: Cruise Control and he'd never even seen it!

Martin, Denmark.

No comments:

Post a Comment