Girl TV versus Boy TV

They say that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.

There are numerous ways that this can be demonstrated in our house. 

I like coming home from work and having my dinner, he likes grazing all evening and at no point eating a proper meal.

At weekends, I like staying in bed late and then getting up for the day, he likes getting up before daybreak and then going back to bed for an extra little sleep in the afternoon.

I think money is meant to be spent, as quickly as possible, before bills and overdrafts take it all.  He thinks responsible people try to save some money and never buy things they won't use.  And never ever get into overdraft in the first place.

But one of the biggest differences in my house has to be the television we watch.

And I'm supposed to be lucky.  His Nibs doesn't watch sport, other than the infernal GAA that takes up every Sunday from May to September. 

Once the All Ireland is over, I tend to relax and think it's all over at last, and we can go back to normal television rules.  Except there are no normal television rules.

I record Eastenders, I admit it.  I also watch QI and Downton Abbey.  And numerous re-runs of old comedies.  Not always good ones.  He records Boardwalk Empire, fair enough, and from then things go downhill.

Storage Wars.  In the name of all that was ever good, why would anybody watch this awful programme?  In case you haven’t watched it, the premise of the programme is that people go to storage unit sales, and buy the contents of the units unseen.  I can only assume that the people who own the contents are dead or in jail or too broke to pay the locker rental anymore.  So the participants in the programme, who do this for a living, spend hundreds and hundreds on the mysterious lockers, and then empty out the contents , sell everything that’s sellable, and try to make their money back.  There’s loads of people trying to bid more than each other, but not bid too much, and the competition is absolutely fierce.

His Nibs loves it.  It makes me want to eat my own fists.

Then there’s Air Crash Investigation, when we sit watching analysis of the reasons why innocent people get mangled on a simple flight home from their holidays.  I normally sit in horrified silence and try to read a book or something. 

His Nibs stores all the information in his head and entertains me with it the next time we take a long flight.

Rattlesnake Republic is about a group of people who wander around the Southern states of America looking for rattlesnakes, risking life and limb to put the poor things into bags, and then sell them for their skin.  The one time I watched it a ninety five year old woman went up a mountain with a group of snake hunters and almost gave herself a cardiac arrest in the midday sun.  I swear I’m not making this up.  Armed with just a stick, she helped these enormous men find a nest of snakes and bring them off to a seller to have their heads attached to cowboy hats and the rest of them made into boots.

It’s repulsive, to be honest.

And I’m sure most people have seen Banged Up Abroad, where the horrific prison stories of both guilty and innocent Westerners in prisons far away are  spiced up with reconstructions of vicious beatings, and on one horrific occasion, a man being gang raped by the prison guards.

One recent evening,  we arrived home from work and I sneaked into the living room before he did.  He came in to Eastenders, where, as usual, everyone was either shouting or crying. 

I tried telling him that we’d be following Eastenders up with a dose of Downton Abbey, and a biography of a famous writer.  Or maybe a DVD box set, one of my favourite things.  It drives His Nibs bonkers, I start at the beginning of the series, and then watch one episode after the other until bedtime.  Even if I start at five in the evening.

He nearly had a conniption fit when I told him my plans for the evening.  We had a short but vicious fight, which involved him storming that fine then, he’d just go to bed.  Then I snarled that he needn’t bother, I’d go to bed, and he could have his bloody television.  But he wouldn’t give in. 

So eventually we both went to bed sulking.  To the same bed.  Where we lay back to back, not speaking, and the television had a lovely night off for itself.