The Carmine test card

When I was a child, 24-hour tv was a thing of the distant future. No breakfast tv. No daytime trash. No round-the-clock kill-your-child's-concentration Japanese cartoons. No 24/7 pop videos. British tv in the mid-60s started at 3:45pm with the children's programmes, and ended with the National Anthem at about 11:30. I have vague memories of children's morning tv, and I'm sure someone will put me right on this point.

So that you could tune your tv in while there was nothing doing on the screen, the BBC showed a 'test card', a devilishly complicated pattern of lines and colours designed to allow engineers to test reception and get the horizontals horizontal and the verticals vertical. (Anyone remember an engineer coming to the house to tune in the tv? I do! The world would be a different place if they still did it...)

Imprinted on the minds of hundreds of thousands of people who as children fresh-in from school eagerly waited for the tv set to warm up every afternoon is this image of a young girl (the designer's daughter) and a rather sinister-looking chum :

Leaving A View from Carmine Superiore without a test card of some sort has seemed increasingly wrong as the days of my absence have piled up. I'd like to have left a reminder that I haven't gone for good, and that if you're all patient just a little longer, normal service (perhaps even some decent writing, some juicy village gossip and a couple of interesting ideas) may shortly be forthcoming as scheduled. A glass of squash and a couple of garibaldi biscuits are good for whiling away the time, as I remember.

My first thought was a timely, witty and thought-provoking quotation of some sort. Then I remembered Dorothy L. Sayers' famous quote : "A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought". I guess it's true that there's not much original thought going on at all this week, but I don't have to advertise the fact, do I?

On further consideration, I thought that Carmine might be able to provide its own test card :

It's faintly appropriate in that it's the woman AJ sees every day as he begins his post-school walk up the hill (without squash and biscuits)...

So whaddya think?