WHAT did people do before TV was invented? I’m about to find out...

My telly is on the blink. I’ve been without it a whole five days and I’m ashamed to say it’s making me feel irritable and hard done by. For several months I’ve had a poor satellite reception and now I can’t get any channels, or even watch on-demand or recorded programmes. Having twiddled all the buttons, checked the cables and done the turning-off-and-on-again thing, I contacted Sky and was told they couldn’t send an engineer out for three weeks! This was despite me agreeing to sign up for an upgrade, for an extra £12 a month.

I remember the days when people rented TV sets, and I’m pretty sure that if something went wrong a man from Radio Rentals would be round to fix it within a day or two. Now it’s 2018 and I have to wait the best part of a month for an appointment. Digital TV is fine until it goes wrong.

I only have one TV, (I don’t have one in the bedroom because it’s bad feng shui, or something), my laptop has died and I’m not modern enough to watch telly any other way. So, for the first time since I was a student (when I had a life instead of a telly), I’m not watching any TV. I feels like I’m part of a social experiment, like those programmes that take families back to the 19th century when they have to eat lard, wear a shawl and use a mangle.

I keep telling myself it’s no bad thing to be without television for a while. I’ll go swimming instead. I’ll sort out all those old photos left untouched in a box for years. I’ll paint the bathroom. I’ll clean the oven. I’ll read the works of Dickens. I’ll take up upholstery. I’ll become ‘Accomplished’ and fill my time with embroidery and poetry, like ladies of the olden days did.

It’s not as if I watch loads of telly anyway. I don’t get home from work until the evening, and I’m often out one or two nights a week. I never watch daytime TV, and if I’m home at weekends I’d rather have the radio on.

But, like many people, after a day at work, if there’s nothing else planned, I like to unwind with a bit of telly. Not even having that option makes me feel churlishly sorry for myself.

Maybe it’s God’s way of getting me off the sofa. According to a report I read this week, UK adults spend eight times longer watching TV than they do exercising. Research by not-for-profit health body ukactive reveals that Brits spend an average of 12 hours a week watching on-demand TV, compared with one hour 30 minutes being physically active. That’s roughly 624 hours a year (26 whole days), compared with 78 hours (three days) of physical activity.

A quarter of UK adults are classed as physically inactive, getting fewer than 30 minutes of moderate exercise a week, and 14per cent admit they get no exercise at all. Leisure time risks being dominated by screen time, with adults spending around 12 hours a week on social media and around 17 hours in total per week on smartphones and tablets.

Add to that the amount of time many of us spend sitting at a desk all day, and behind a wheel driving home, and a sedentary lifestyle dominated by the job, the car, the TV and the computer starts to look like an inactivity crisis.

Meeting the recommended levels of exercise can lead to significant health benefits, including reduced risk of type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia and some cancers, according to statistics from Public Health England.

Physical inactivity is a silent killer and it’s lurking with a scythe in my living-room.

Time to hit the gym. Maybe there'll be a telly in there...

* 'PTSD' over-use insults the real sufferers of trauma

TO have “post traumatic stress disorder”, surely you must first have experienced a trauma.

This week Katie Price went into rehab, revealing she has PTSD. Speaking on TV’s Loose Women, Mel B said she too had suffered PTSD after her marriage breakdown.

I’m sure they’ve had tough times, but isn’t that just life? Most of us will at some time endure an awful experience, such as divorce, bereavement or illness. It doesn’t mean we'll get post-traumatic stress.

I’m currently reading Vera Brittain’s World War 1 memoir Testament of Youth, about a generation scarred by loss. Men returned from unimaginable battlefield horrors with PTSD, but it wasn’t talked about. Now it’s talked about too much, often in the wrong context.

* Jobs for the boys... get them started early on

A COLLEAGUE confessed that her son, who's in his twenties and has his own home, still brings his washing for her to do. Er, is this 2018 or the 1950s?

My nephews, aged 15 and 17, do regular chores, from loading the dishwasher to mowing the lawn. They like to cook, and the oldest one irons his clothes. My sister refuses to bring up boys who rely on women to do everything for them. Quite right.

There's nothing worse than a mummy's boy who can't even switch the washing machine on.