We do a lot of watching. I sometimes think that we are defined by what we watch. Moreover there are more places than ever to watch. One of the entertainments is watching people who are busy watching hand held devices walk into the tree on the pavement outside my kitchen window. I like watching that because they are always surprised by it and it’s a tree. It’s quite big and it’s never moved and yet it surprises them.
The OH watches a lot of television. He enjoys almost any programme involving goodies and baddies killing each other. He likes people getting blown up, people getting shot, bows and arrows, intercontinental ballistic missiles, any film about any war, anywhere, detectives working out who shot whom, forensic pathologists working out why who shot whom and assorted dead bodies.
I don’t but we live in an open plan house with the television right in the middle.
I like to watch shopping channels and craft channels on television while I am working out. I am getting back to physical fitness again and very happy to be having the strength to do an hour in the morning because I want to, not just because if I don’t my arm won’t work. I have managed to do the exercise thing which is two wheels and a handle that you roll along the floor, for the first time in two years and was pleased to watch the carpet in close-up while I did it.
On a shopping channel I discovered Matthew Palmer, a watercolourist who has his own Internet art show at www.watercolour.tv and I like to watch him paint pictures. I have been having a go at watercolour, which I think is interesting. I’m fairly competent at alcohol markers, inks, oils and acrylics but watercolour is a very different medium with much more subtle effects. So far I’m rubbish which makes me feel cheerful, I do enjoy a new challenge of something just sufficiently out of my comfort zone to make me keep going. Meanwhile I find watching Matthew paint a picture to be very de-stressing.
I just spent the morning having my hair permed which involves me watching myself in a mirror for a couple of hours. Horror film, not to be watched by the faint hearted. I only go every six months, which means you get the opportunity to watch yourself ageing. I have done this fairly rapidly over the last few years, when I began looking after my mother I looked OK, I thought but five years as carer, two broken arms, cancer and a husband with drinking issues can give you the opportunity to watch yourself slide downhill. Not good.
What I am enjoying watching most at present is my novel growing. I am up to 110,000 words and have only three, I think, chapters to write and then I’m finished. I still have to do the illustrations for inside. I like to read the kind of books that have line drawings of things pertaining to the story, so I think I should do some. I drew the cover in the autumn before last, when my broken arm wouldn’t type easily but I could wield a pencil, providing it wasn’t a heavy one. I took the cover along to the copy shop so I have copies to colour or not, depending how I feel about that. But it has been very enjoyable watching it grow.
And soon I will be able to get back out in the garden and watch that grow, which is my favourite thing of all to watch. I have not been able to watch it much. Five years followed by broken arms, garden reconstruction and the OH’s woodworking shed meant I could only do bits, though I have enjoyed painting the fence.
What you watch says a lot about you. What do you watch?
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