Real life | 20 November 2010

‘Please, please, do not touch the Sky cables.’ That was my unequivocal instruction to the builder as he set about repainting my living room. My furniture was piled in the centre of the floor covered with dustsheets. But poking out from the dust sheets were the wires coming from the TV, still connected to the Sky box, from which a long line of white cable wended its way to the wall.

‘But you can reconnect them,’ he tried to reason with me. ‘You can pull the wires out and put them back in.’ I told him to get a grip of himself. This was crazy talk. Once you mess with Sky cables, you are on the road to perdition.

Yes, of course, disconnecting the television ought to be a simple matter. I can certainly remember that when I was a child we unplugged the telly often and with gay abandon.

But times have moved on. Televisions nowadays are not so much plugged into the wall as hooked up to The Matrix. They have more wires coming out of them than Keanu Reeves in his pod when the machines were harvesting his bioelectrical energy. In fact, I’m fairly sure you could have tidied the cables around Reeves. There’s absolutely no chance of tidying the cables around my TV.

Yes, it would be simpler to get myself transported to a simulated parallel life than to unplug my television from a Sky box and plug it back in again.

I live in fear of the wretched contraption coming unstuck. Once, the rabbit ate the cables and I panicked so much I ended up calling one of those cowboy satellite repair firms who charged me £560 to fix them.