The mobile phone has given us, as if we weren’t bulging with them already, a new kind of cheat: the phone-weasels who infest trivia nights. I was at one recently and the table who won made my gang very suspicious. We suspected that it was furtive texting that was giving such unfeasibly correct answers on Melbourne Cup history to a table of respectable-looking women and their teenagers. My table of eagle-eyed specialists came robbed-second. We were good: Rick the Renaissance man, Tom the sports fan, Terry the scientist, my sister the lit and music bible, and me the useless-info meistress and winner of the bubble-gum-blowing contest. Hah, those bimbos were left picking goo out of their bridgework—they couldn’t text their way out of that one.
Some of us use our TV-watching time profitably. There are those who knit in front of the telly, others who crochet or embroider, and yet others who construct Victorian paper-tassel-work mermaids in tasteful colours to go with that tole picture of the white geese on a blue background that they got from Family Circle. And some of us chew gum, never knowing when it might come in handy. I mean, you have to do something. The telly isn’t the same any more since the end of Buffy.The new stuff doesn’t grab me.
The post-Buffy vacuum has left me grumpy. I discovered this best and fairest emanation of America last year, in its sixth series, the one that purists deplore. Hooked, lined and sinkered on the least Buffy had to offer, I hired out the rest, the sheer gold, and watched them with all the fervour of the middle-aged who’ve discovered something new to think about. The nephew who’d goaded me into watching threw up his hands and rolled his eyes at his Aunt Frankenstein. ‘Never try to get her interested in something because you just might succeed,’ said my son. I think I’ve spoilt Buffy for him. He, being young and male, prefers the more Y-chromosomed approach of Angel, which to me is nice but mere Cadbury’s compared to the pure Valrhona of the Buff.
He occasionally finds he likes something out of the usual 21-year-old male ken, like the reruns of Keeping Up Appearances on cable, though he would die rather than admit it. (He has developed the annoying habit of calling me ‘Hyacinth’ when particularly narked, but that puts me in quite exalted company: readers of