Life: Camel To & Fro-ing

Apparently, when it comes to roof handles, its important that they are camel-proof. Thankfully, the makers of said roof handles have taken the very real risk of a camel trying to eat your roof handles into account in the development of their product. Kudos, Roof Handle Makers. Kudos.

Somewhat disappointingly, roof handles are nothing like love handles for roofs but that’s a side issue. The main issue here is that it’s quite simply amazing what you learn from watching commercial TV, especially when you’ve managed to avoid it for nine months as I have.

People are always asking me if I caught The MasterVoiceRestaurantImprovement show the other night and I always have to explain to them that I don’t have The Television at home. They invariably look at me and blink slowly, like I must spend my leisure hours barn-raising with the rest of my Amish kinfolk.

Don’t get me wrong: I do have a TV set –  it’s just not hooked up to “the grid”. We just use it to play DVDs and the rest we look up on the interwebs. We proactively seek out our entertainment rather than just let it fall on our laps. And we avoid the ads.

Of course, we also miss out on a lot of vital information as a recent weekend away showed me. It was impossible to resist the sequin-encrusted lure of Eurovision on our accommodation’s fully functioning TV set. And when my partner went to mute the first ad break, I slapped his hand away from the remote and exclaimed “Oooh, ads!” in that same kind of voice I use when I find chocolate biscuits hidden behind the eggs at the back of the fridge.

That night I learnt a lot. I learnt that camels must be able to climb roofs (to eat the roof handles, obviously) and that “caravan overflow” is a serious concern to a lot of people. And no, I don’t know what caravan overflow is either but I can tell you it does lead to some amazingly cheap prices on recent model caravans worthy of multiple exclamation marks!!! Surprisingly, there was another ad featuring camels – this time with people riding them (perhaps to escape the caravan overflow) and I realised that camels obviously play a far more important role in modern day Australian life than I could ever have imagined…

When combined with an innovative Eurovision drinking game (“Drink when there’s a key change!”), this was a slippery-dippery slope, my friends. A slope so slippery and dippery that it ended with my partner and I glued to Psychic TV in the early hours of the morning, wishing the mobile reception was better so we could SMS the hosts and find out “what the future holds” (my personal prediction: a spontaneous and yet instantly regrettable purchase of a product with more registered trademarks than actual letters in its brand name).

As we finally pried ourselves away from the television closer to the dawn than anyone over thirty should ever be, we muttered to each other “This… THIS… is the reason we don’t have our television hooked up to the grid…” and fell into dreams punctuated by exclamation marks and perfect teeth.

Thankfully, now that I’m back home in my little bubble, my mind has settled and I am safe once again… except occasionally, late at night when the world is quiet, I swear I can hear chewing sounds high up on my roof. Damn camels.

What has TV taught you lately?