Remote Control

I took delivery of a new television set today. We now have his and her TVs, after I finally resolved that watching the screen when Outdoor Man controls the remote is just too tricky. Whenever I thought that we were settling down to watch something, lo the channel changed. What is it about men and their innate desire to surf TV channels? For a gender that is notorious for its inability to “juggle,” it certainly has to be congratulated on being able to follow a dozen programmes contemporaneously.

A family law colleague once remarked to me, after encountering similar issues in her own living room, that she found it curious that she had never been asked by a client to draft a divorce petition incorporating allegations of unreasonable behaviour based on a husband’s operation of the television remote controller. I never did either. I do recall proceedings, once upon a time, which referred to a wife’s concealment of the remote but generally speaking the fairer sex clearly learnt long ago that there are some battles that are not worth the fight.

Moreover, when house contents came to be divided, in my experience it was not unknown for a husband to magnanimously concede that his wife could have the majority of the furniture and white goods, so long only as he could retain their largest television set. Fortuitously she usually agreed to him having the remote controller too.