How to Live Without TV

  1. Remove TV from house; delete all TV-related tabs, apps etc.
  2. Ta-da! You are living without TV.


Except what we really want to know is not how to live without TV, but how to thrive without TV. (Side note: if English was a more sensible language, that would have rhymed and been an all-around more catchy sentence.)

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I’m A Gnu

I’m knitting socks at the moment, out of a single ball of yarn – knitting the ball at both ends, as one might say. To avoid the awkwardness of having one short sock and one long one, I have both socks underway simultaneously – first foot, second foot, second leg, first leg. Unequal sockage duly avoided.

What I have failed to avoid, however, are the strains of The S-Song of the S-Second S-Sock, floating through my mind. And since that song is set to the tune of The Gnu by Flanders & Swann, I have found myself proclaiming at intervals that I’m a gnu.

Black wildebeest, or white-tailed gnu, Connochaetes gnou at Krugersdorp Game Reserve, Gauteng, South Africa (31233781942)
Gnu waiting for horns to grow long enough to knit with.
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Working Through It

Once upon a time there was a woman called Anna Margaretta Brereton, and she had ten children.
One by one, five of her children died. After the loss of her fifth child, she withdrew to her chamber and began to sew. She cut, she basted, she pieced, she appliquéd, she embroidered.
She hand-sewed not only a full, sweeping bedspread for a four-poster bed, but all the drapes and hangings to go with it.

Bedsead, Boston area, 1760-1780, mahogany, maple, white pine, reproduction hangings - Concord Museum - Concord, MA - DSC05712
This is not Mrs Brereton’s work, but you can see the quantity involved.
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