some of you may know i grew up in a household with no television. it’s just something my dad saw no real use for, and in fact my parents had been married for more than 40 years before they bought their first tv. not being able to carry on conversations with my grade school peers about the latest episode of battlestar galactica or the bionic man was often awkward, and it certainly gave them cause to hassle me for that most serious of kid crimes: being different. i really don’t regret the lack of tv though, because, among other things, it made me a reader, which i’m pretty sure helped me be a better writer. in retrospect, that may also have been when i started to become a fighter…
at any rate the last seven months of recovery from this spinal cord injury have given me ample time to make up for all the tv i missed as a kid. after watching the tube so much, i’m convinced of something. i believe that within the next 100 years all americans will be speaking with a british accent. say again, old chap?? i know it sounds nutty, but seriously… every reality show has at least one person with an english accent, and apparently that’s the number one requirement to be a narrator for anything on the discovery channel.
the deal is that for some reason americans are just completely taken with the dulcet tones of a west end london accent… or is it east end, or, maybe one from yorkshire? that’s the funny thing. there isn’t just one english accent, or just one scottish accent, and the same thing applies to ireland. i was joking with my english buddy david nightingale one day about it and commented that while we might have ten distinct accents in america, there must be literally dozens in the united kingdom, and one half of the population can’t understand the other. he regarded me with the kind of contempt only an englishman can muster and said, “actually mate, it’s probably more like hundreds.” whatever. my favorite has to be scottish. i mean, who sounds cooler than sean connery?
being a farm kid, one of my other naturally favorite things about scotland is the rolling pastures filled with sheep. so, of course i had to make some photographs of them. here’s one i’ve been rubbing on for a while.
sheep grazing at twilight, edinburgh, 2009
] Chris is right, you love TV and you know it. I am very proud of instilling that addiction in you. I watched way too much TV as a kid, but alas with the greatest invention of the latter half of the 20th century, the DVR(AKA nocotine patch for TV’aholics) I am now able to manage my cravings more effectively.
by will
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