Home is where the heart is!

This week has seen me have a little time free so a two day visit up to Yorkshire was on the cards.

Mother who is 88 has recently entered the digital world. After strong denial that she would ever use one, I bought her a first video recorder in 1987 from the profits I made from my somewhat glittering appearance in Ken Russell's "Salome's Last Dance" - mercifully no longer available on DVD.

After leaving her a set of instructions as to how to record and watch programmes on a set of cards, the video soon became a mainstay of her life and she loved it for watching her soaps etc on evenings when she had been out at bowls club meetings, or parish council shindigs. After many years of use, the video finally gave up its existence in late January of this year and evenings of missing Emmerdale started to become a problem.

Now to everyone who has one, the digibox is the key to changing your whole lifestyle regarding watching tv. You store up programmes you want to watch and are not bound by the timings of the schedulers. So was a digibox the way forward for Mum?

It seemed an expensive experiment to buy a new one, so I bought a second hand one on E bay which had good reviews as being simple to operate. A days excursion to Yorkshire in early February found me trying to install it and finding that the remote control didn't work. My E bay trader was excellent, answered my call within minutes and promised to send a new remote. A further trip to Yorkshire several days later installed the new remote and allowed me to give a brief explanation of how it worked to Mum. I typed out simple instructions in a large font and left them with her. The broken remote became an advantage as it meant that we at Sydenham Central Video Control had another remote in our hands when talking our client through programming her box. To ease this process further, I marked several buttons on her remote with nail polish in various colours.

This has led to such conversations as the one overheard by the wardrobe master on "Doctors" one morning as I tried to programme the box at distance for that nights soaps while getting dressed in Birmingham.

"No, find the nail varnish button. Got it. Now the button next to the nail varnish - push that - yes? Good, now Emmerdale should have gone dark blue - has it?"

We get there bit by bit and in a way its helped give us a meaning for our thrice daily phone conversations. A purpose to them which has made them all the more meaningful and fulfilling. At least I feel that by ringing I have done something useful, and the conversation flows more YYorshire naturally as a result of our mutual endeavour in tryign to programme the box.

there have been lowlights - the Friday morning at 8.57 am when our bedside phone rang with the plaintive tones of Mum crying out "I've pressed something and it's all gone wiggly" - a feat I have tried to achieve for many years!

The digibox is working fine, and she loves the idea that when she gets back in from telling the vicar that "no they are not selling more parish land to build Barratt Homes", she can have a whole evening of fictionalised life, so important to an 88 year old woman living alone. Yorkshire is where Mum has always wanted to be and with a little help from the digital world, it's where she can stay among her friends and enjoy her life