We didn't see Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, and Cupid, but Donner and Blitzen did their names proud because we had heaps of thunder and lightning and torrential rain all through the long Christmas weekend.
The other reindeers must've been laughing at us as we binge-watched the first, then the second, the third, and finally the sixth and seventh season of "Columbo". What saved us from turning into complete couch potatoes was that we didn't have the fourth and fifth season. Maybe next year!
I still remember Lieutenant Columbo's trademark outfit of a rumpled raincoat over a suit-and-tie and his characteristic squint (caused by a glass eye in the right socket) from my second stint at Barton House in 1969.
Those were the days of watching what was then still black-and-white television in the boarding-house's TV Lounge. I treasured them because there had been no television in South-West Africa where I had just come from, and there was going to be no television where I was heading: first New Guinea, then Burma, Thursday Island, the Solomons, and Samoa.
Those television-"deprived" years turned me into a bookworm instead of a TV addict - well, until this "Columbo"-an Christmas! And, stealing from Columbo's famous phrase together with his characteristic hand gesture, "just one more thing ...": I'm glad I spent all those years without TV!
