OPINION:
The Sochi Winter Olympics provide a wonderful excuse to have the TV whirring away in the background from sun up till sun down.
Call me old-fashioned but I can just hear my mother tsk-tsking and saying: “Turn that blasted thing off. Watching television in the daytime is morally lax and beyond common.”
Normally I would agree with her. When I go to people’s houses and the TV set remains on while I am visiting, I immediately subtract 50 points off their IQ.
But the rule is broken for the Olympics, especially winter ones with all that gorgeous white, which makes the bold colours of the sporting uniforms appear even more striking.
I seem to remember we were allowed to have the tiny portable, rabbit-eared black and white TV on at my grandfather’s bach during the holidays in order to watch the cricket during the glory of the Hadlee years.
There was something very comforting about hearing the whack of the ball connecting with the willow and the drawl of the commentators who would occasionally yelp out in that peculiar sound of male strangulated pleasure at an outstanding catch achieved at silly mid-off. Obsessed with the card game 500, we found the background cricket was an advantage because the males in the family would be distracted by it and forget to play the joker or the left and right bower in the correct order.
A girl has to take advantage of these things, which is exactly what Christchurch “single”, as she is described in the newspaper item, Louise Sutherland did when a chap she was stepping out with for a moment left his sunglasses at her house and failed to retrieve them.
“I found his sunnies and texted him to see if he wanted them back.
“Obviously he didn’t want to see me so much – he just left them,” she said. Months elapsed before she decided to, as she put it, “make some money out of this” and entered the sunglasses on Trade Me where her tale of rejection elicited more than 50 questions from men wanting to know more about her and her single status. This article was read out to me by a single female friend who said this was evidence there was not a girl drought happening in Christchurch, as alleged by lonely foreign tradies. The friend has recently voiced dread at the approach of Valentines Day and wants to do something or go somewhere to distract her from the stain of being sans bloke.
This infuriates me as I tell her she should be proud to be a card-carrying bullet dodger and even prouder to be a spinster avec chat.
There is no greater calling than to lay one’s life down for a cat with only the expectation of a purr of appreciation or a lick of the eyelids from the fur alarm clock to wake one in the morning.
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If she was someone’s missus she might, as a woman recently told me, be called upon to perform what she described as “pastoral sex” outdoors with her husband every Valentines Day in return for a dozen red roses.
Over the years she has negotiated it down to sex in front of the TV while the cricket is on. Another pal presents her hubby with a card with 12 demarcated boxes he can clip to record the allotted marital acts. Talk about thinking outside the box.
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