As a for­mer broad­cast jour­nal­ist, what I’m about to con­fess amounts to heresy: at the moment I nei­ther have, nor miss hav­ing, a TV set. That’s due in no small part to being where more inti­mate and gen­tle ways mea­sure and put the world into perspective.

Being able to embrace them and not feel I’m sell­ing myself short, is one of the many  joys of retire­ment and sum­mers spent on a lake gird­ed by pine and decid­u­ous trees and pop­u­lat­ed by wildlife.
An ear­ly evening walk, for exam­ple, pre­sent­ed me with the first of what will with­in a few weeks, report the progress of life by turn­ing my road and the for­est floor into a tapes­try of colours that will rival the finest woven ones on dis­play anywhere.
Dur­ing that brief but won­drous time, con­ven­tion­al news out­lets will emit a non-stop gush of over-used clich­es and pseu­do-wis­dom, dis­guised as analy­sis and prog­nos­ti­ca­tions on the “race” for the nom­i­na­tion to con­test what is grand­ly mis­rep­re­sent­ed as  “the lead­er­ship of the free world.” None of it will report any­thing that amounts to use­ful change.
I know that because, unable to drop a life­long fas­ci­na­tion with news as eas­i­ly and nat­u­ral­ly as trees shed their leaves, I must fur­ther con­fess to dip­ping dai­ly into news that inter­ests or affects me (not much of the lat­ter I’m pleased to say), cour­tesy of  BBC World Ser­vice radio, local news broad­casts and online newspapers.
Radio has the advan­tage of not mak­ing me waste pre­cious time and ener­gy curs­ing the bad gram­mar and kabu­ki-like on-cam­eras that TV news offers up, although radio is steadi­ly going to hell in a hand­bas­ket on the man­gled syn­tax side, too.
                             MORE TAKE THAN GIVE 
In addi­tion to sooth­ing the souls of we who observe them in won­der, the leaves add nutri­ents for the ground they cover.
On per­for­mance so far, the Repub­li­can hope­fuls are the antithe­sis. Their first “debate” pro­vid­ed nei­ther attrac­tive colour nor food for nutri­tious thought. How­ev­er, appar­ent­ly they seemed log­i­cal and attrac­tive to par­ty faith­ful, who don’t seem con­cerned about the future of democ­ra­cy in their coun­try. Add to that the FOX News mod­er­a­tors’ lack of fol­low-up or prob­ing of con­tra­dic­to­ry claims and about- turns on opin­ions of Trump, and it end­ed up being lit­tle more than a divert­ing exam­ple of the glib gulling  the gormless.
But what can you expect when the par­ty has an influ­en­tial wing that thinks ban­ning books is an act of cul­tur­al and moral pro­tec­tion, as opposed to an assault on knowl­edge and denial of the right to learn and make up one’s own mind?
The same goes for those on the left who can­not see the right’s point of view for their own self-right­eous­ness, epit­o­mised by those who want to do their own form of ban­ning by re-writ­ing children’s books in the name of woke.

They’ll all still be at it when the lone Cana­da goose I spot­ted dry­ing its wings joins oth­ers and pass­es above them in one of their won­drous fly­ing “vees”, on the way south to wait out the win­ter. The lead role in the “vee” will be will­ing­ly shared by those most fit for the job. Anoth­er les­son from Nature we’ve yet to assim­i­late, it seems.
When autumn draws down and win­ter looms, I’ll store my kayak, drain the water pipes, lock the doors and head back to the “real” world.

Then, no doubt, TV and I will do the equiv­a­lent of kiss­ing and mak­ing up.
At eight every evening, I’ll plonk myself in a chair and surf the half a dozen inter­na­tion­al news networks.
But for now, heresy suits me just fine.

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