two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude

This is the first summer in six years that I haven't been glued to Big Brother.

I've tried not watching it before, and I've missed the big opening night several times, but somehow I've always been sucked in and found myself sitting in front of E4 at two in the morning watching people sleeping. Nothing ever happens. The contestants fundamentally have nothing interesting to say to each other or about the world. In the main, it's 10 weeks watching people sleep, sunbathe and show off their astonishing ignorance. And still I watched, and I've hated myself for it. How can there not be something better to do than watch that shit?

This year I've kicked the habit. I've seen it's been on, and on a couple of occasions I have even sat there and watched 5 minutes or so. It just hasn't grabbed me, and my evenings have been left free to do all sorts of other things instead. Why, just last night, instead of watching the daily roundup of non-events in the Big Brother house, I watched an episode of Seinfeld ('The Robbery' - the one from the first series where Jerry and George toss a coin over who should take the appartment near the Park). Now that's living, huh?

Okay, Maybe not, but the point is that I have liberated myself from the D.I.Y. lobotomy of reality TV, and I am not spending my summer in thrall to some dribbling cretins locked up in a house and performing like monkeys in the hope of a tabloid payout and some kind of post BB half-life as a z-list 'celebrity'.

And then I found out that there had been some shagging.... and then some more shagging.

For all that I am busy rejoycing in my glorious moral and intellectual superiority, a little tiny part of me hates the fact that I missed it.