We don’t have a normal TV aerial - or at least, not for the big TV in the living room - chiefly because it has the worst reception in the known universe.The town we live in rests in the foot of a beautiful rolling valley - and while it provides wonderful walks along the river in summer, it also means we may as well turn the TV aerial on our roof into a coat hangar.
For the past ten years we have relied on satellite television, and for the past several months it has been growing steadily worse. Given that we pay out quite a bit each month to receive such crappy service we decided to do something about it.
I spent lunchtime looking at prices, and calling satellite TV fitters - to get somebody to come out and make sure that we’re at least pointing at the right place in the sky.
This evening, after getting home I wandered out into the back garden to see where an engineer might put a new satellite dish - and W suddenly realised something rather obvious… if you traced a line from the receiver on our satellite dish, imaginarily bounced it off the dish, and out into space, it ran straight into the very topmost branches of a fir tree growing halfway down our garden.
Suddenly it all made sense. The TV had been getting worse for months - which coincided with summer; and the fir tree growing another foot or two.
After an hour of precarious climbing, chopping, and sawing, our fir tree experienced something of a massacre. It’s worth pointing out that this was all done on a hunch - we had no real proof the tree was the cause at all, so you can imagine the apprehension when I climbed down (after a minor accident where half the tree fell on the kids corn plantation), and switched the satellite TV signal test screen on.
The little bar graph that had been reading “pathetic” (ok, ok… it was about 30% full) was suddenly 70% full. The other little bar graph that had been reading “crud”, was now similarly full.
We flicked through channels, and both grinned at W’s cleverness. We have TV back. We have avoided the cost of an engineer coming round, and we can now buy a FreeSat box, cancel our Sky subscription, and become couch potatoes.
The end of “Sky” in our house means the end of the Disney channels, which I took some great delight in explaining to our eldest; she has become worryingly addicted to all manner of brain atrophying garbage shown back-to-back on weekends - from Hannah Montana to Zak and Cody - we shall not miss them.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with the half a fir tree sat on our decking.