Mirror, mirror on the bathroom floor

When I arrived in Scotland for Christmas I was delighted to find I could watch my favourite American crime series (CSI, NCIS, Heroes, etc.) on Sky practically all the time. At home I watch them dubbed in French, but with the original sound track the dialogues are subtler and the voices much more exciting. Pretty soon I realised there was no gain, for most of the channels gave approximately 6 minutes actual viewing between adverts. I hate adverts. Chopping the programmes up into such little bits makes them unwatchable. Half the time the adverts come on without prior notice and the result is total confusion.

One week after I got back I was listening to the news on the wireless when I heard “Nicolas Sarkozy is going to ban advertising from State television. The share price of TF1 rose 12% immediately after the announcement.” I was overjoyed. I thought I must have heard it wrong. It felt like “une aubaine” (a godsend). Of course, thought I, everybody is so delighted that we’ll have some watchable channels. I couldn’t understand why none of the other news sources announced this as “good news”. My first mistake was to think that TF1 was a State channel. It isn’t. Apparently it belongs to one of Sarkozy’s pals and the move was seen as robbing the public sector to line the pockets of the private sector.

In the continuing saga of the horrible painting, the one I did in summer 2006 and was convinced I was going to paint over, we are talking temporary rehabilitation. It has been sitting on the bathroom floor leaning against the wall, holding the odd wet towel occasionally. I acquired a piano and the only bit of wall it could go on had a mirror on it that was partially hidden by the piano. I toyed with the idea of changing the height of the mirror. The other day I took the mirror off the wall to investigate this possibility further and hey presto, found that the painting seemed to fit the space. The mirror is not quite big enough to hold towels off the floor.