Crazy Salad

A girlfriend of mine once lived with a guy for 3 years until they eventually broke up and he moved out. I can barely remember his real name, but we nicknamed him  'waste of space guy'. 


They lived together for 3 years in her 4-storey house and after he had packed and removed his belongings, including all household items that he had purchased over the 3 years, the only discernible difference was that she was down a set of salad servers.  Though the house was filled with sofas, beds, furniture, lamps, accessories, electrical appliances and white goods, his only contribution had been two green, plastic, long-handled salad spoons.


What astounded me most is that when he moved out - to a dingy bedsit in Clapham - he actually took them with him, packing them in amongst his clothes, shoes and sporting gear.  Which made me wonder how long he sat on his beanbag with his cricket bat in one hand and his salad servers in the other, before he realised that he didn't even own a bowl to make a salad in.  


 You can see where we came up with his nickname, can't you? 


I speak of this, because when my most recent boyfriend and I broke up, the biggest difference in my life is that I could no longer watch my favourite American tv shows, which he used to download for me using Bit Torrent on the internet. I had long suspected this practise wasn't entirely legal, but faced with the alternative of watching Coronation Street, I turned a blind eye. I turned several blind eyes each week, in fact, and thus became addicted to a number of hit US shoes that will probably appear on screens in the UK at some point in the next few years, but who has that kind of patience? 


After that relationship ended, therefore, I was hit with withdrawal symptoms pretty bad. Yes, I still had a full set of kitchen utensils, but most evenings I was trying to slash my wrists with most of them in order to avoid watching Panorama.  


Last night, faced with a choice of 'A History of Ancient Britain' or 'Masterchef', I decided that enough is quite enough. And so it came to be that I spent my evening coming to grips with BitTorrent. At first glance, it seemed like a pretty technical world of trackers and transmitters and decoders, but it was actually much simpler than he had made it look. (Perhaps he had wanted to add value in the relationship by doing something that I couldn't do myself, but he didn't fancy re-tiling the roof). Turns out that with a fast internet connection, and a flagrant disregard for copyright laws, you can be watching the latest episode of The Good Wife within minutes of it airing in the US.  


So my dog and I curled up on the couch (she is still not using the designer bed I bought her, I am thinking of deducting it from her pocket money) and settled down to watching our favourite hit US TV shows. The internet is a magical thing.