Staying out late to watch telly

Some days I feel very idealistic. I dream about reducing my footprint on the earth even further below the Australian average than it already is because I can go weeks without using a car, I live in a flat, I buy Safe toilet paper and I'm too indecisive to buy new clothes very often. (Please bear with me. I realise this assessment is delusional and can't be fixed unless I install a worm farm on my balcony to compost household waste, persuade the cat to live off local insect life, work out how to isolate the air conditioning from my office and convert to green power even though it will double the power bills).

Other days, high faluting principles seem a bit too hard.

One of the principles I've been persuaded to adopt is not to get Pay TV (evil mind numbing commercialism, think how many books you can buy for $50 a month, we watch quite enough dross on free to air etc etc.) This means that the only ways we can see Sydney FC play when they're not at their home ground is to travel long distances to away grounds or find a pub with Foxtel. And I haven't actually kept a running tally of how much we spend on beer in the interests of saving money on pay TV.

Usually finding a pub is ok unless they don't want to swap their tellies over from the cricket or rugby or fashion TV. Usually SOMEONE will agree to show it and, if it's an important game, we can go to proper offical club screenings at the casino. At least they turn the sound up.

But last night it was all a bit hard when the team was playing in China. From 10:00pm. On a school night. When I was tired. I couldn't help but wonder why I was hanging on a bar stool when there was a perfectly good telly all on its own at home that could show me the game if we weren't so very PRINCIPLED. And it wouldn't notice if I wore pyjamas.

To change the subject entirely, last week I read a gently wonderful book called The Dickinson Papers by Mark Ragg. It was about the way people love poetry for different reaons and whether poets' intentions matter and how myths about poets can arise. It's also about finding love in odd places and being brave enough to change the direction of your life. I quite liked the cover (which is this picture above) because all the things on it are important to the plot (and goldfish are cute) but the colleague who lent it to me thought that it had made the book not sell very well. You also learn an awful lot about Emily Dickinson and her work.