So finally things have been sorted out. I used the excuse of a broken telly to invest in a new wall mountable LCD version to free up some much needed space in our back room and while I  had the purse strings loosened located a new washing machine at a reasonable price. So the story ends here right? Wrong.

First the washing machine, I say first because as a bloke kitchen appliances are not at the top of my favourite things list. I  bought a 'graded' version, which basically means there is slight cosmetic damage and as such they lower the price. In this case about 50 bananas were reduced from the price and I must say a slight scratch which cannot be seen anyway as its at the back on the top and therefore hidden under the worksurfaces seems perfectly acceptable for this amount of monetary reduction. Everything is great in the clothes cleansing department apart from of course I cannot get the thing level for love nor money and therefore it shakes the house when it starts its final spin. How the hell are you supposed to get to the back feet to adjust them when its shoved tighter than two coats of cellulose into its place in the kitchen? I sit looking at it now after each minor adjustment waiting for the spin cycle. It has almost become a battle of man against machine and at the moment the machine has quite an advantage.

Moving on..

The Tv looks marvellous on the wall although I warn anyone looking to buy an LCD set that the picture quality still doesn't quite match that of a CRT, no matter what the salesmen tell you and although it is good it still seems like a step backwards to me. However the one I have is supposedly HD ready, perhaps this will make all the difference when the mainstream channels switch over.  I used the auto set up feature where it scans for all the channels and stores them automatically, again this is rather annoying. Why can't an 'intelligent' feature such as this put BBC 1 on channel 1 BBC 2 on channel 2 etc. instead of just picking a preselect seemingly randomly? Result is you still have to spend an hour in the manual set up section repositioning the channels. My main gripe though is the Freeview or digital side of the coin. The Tv kindly informs me that the signal strength from my ariel is low and as such will only occasionally pick up the odd digital channel. How can this be if the analogue signals are perfect?  Well apparently I need a wide band ariel to pick up this service properly. I may invest at a later date if I can be bothered.  It makes me wonder how people are going to cope when the analogue channels are switched off, I see a lot of money to be made in the ariel installation business. If only I wasn't scared of heights..