On Screens

I'm perversely proud of the fact that the tv in our Singapore living room tends to attract pitying comments from guests. Last week Teck Siew happened to be around one evening and announced that the thing was an antique. I think it's around ten years old, possibly a bit more. I remember buying it when another old stager gave up the ghost completely. Both sets have been and are regarded as very small also, in terms of screen size. I think this one has a fourteen inch screen, which seems pretty big to me. (Yesterday we were visiting Hakim's new flat in Woodlands and he'd bought one of those enormous flat screen jobs. I sat there overwhelmed by the sheer dominating bigness of everything that popped up. Disconcertingly not for me, I'm afraid.)

Anyway, as I said, for some reason I quite enjoy the aspersions cast upon our supposedly tiny tv. I guess it makes me feel a glow of righteousness about doing with so little, literally. And I was thinking along these lines earlier this evening when I suddenly remembered that actually we own a grand total of four idiot boxes and could probably fund the education of several children in a developing nation if we sold some of them. There's another in the back bedroom of this apartment, quite a bit bigger than the one in the living room, which is intended for guests. Then we've got two in the house in KL: one little one in the kitchen, which is sort of meant for Noi to have something downstairs as we don't have one in the actual living room; and then one fairly biggish affair which resides upstairs in what is termed the family area. So much for frugality, and I don't dare begin to count the various little video recorders and DVD players and the like we have somehow accumuated.

And the point of all this? Well, certainly not to boast about our extensive possessions. Simply, I suppose, to admit to a truth to which I'm often curiously blind: I own way, way, way, too many things and it's dangerous not to acknowledge such. Suddenly I feel unhealthily bloated.