I’m an odd person in several ways, and some of those – not all – are down to how I grew up.

This isn’t where I’m going to go into the detail of that. But there are a couple of things that feel like major differences that have an ongoing effect in ways that surprise people.

One – no TV

I grew up without a TV. Also without radio or recorded music, but it was the TV that people noticed, for example at school.

Especially as the attitudes that ruled my life hardened on the subject of TV and the school was instructed to let me leave the room whenever they were showing the class anything on a screen.

“You don’t have a TV?” I remember one boy saying, “What does all your furniture point at?”

I was a book-reader, but for most of my life TV was culture. Without shared TV to have seen, a lot of people didn’t seem to know what to talk about. Small talk couldn’t get started. I hadn’t seen the football, or the soaps, or whatever was flavour of the month. I didn’t know the jingles from advertising. I didn’t get the references.

“You’ll get a TV when you grow up,” people at school said. As though it was a foregone conclusion.

And, eventually, when I grew up, I did get a TV. I have one now. But I was in my thirties by then, and, frankly, by now I’m just different, like one of those remote tribespeople who find their way to a modern city and never quite blend in.

I spent a while catching up on TV when I was able to, and to some extent I can see the attraction.

But it still doesn’t work for me, most of the time. There are some things I can enjoy, but not many.

I’ve thought about that a lot, expecially as whenever I say I don’t really watch TV, people assume I think I’m superior for avoiding it, too highbrow or something. It isn’t that. I can see that there is a lot of great art among the TV that’s out there, sheer brilliance, so I don’t look down on people for watching it, as such. I’ve had to think about what the problem is.

And I conclude there are two things, at root.

One is that it’s high impact. Having not grown up around moving images, they mesmerise me. The most trivial video feed snags at my attention. I know people who keep a TV on all day and barely look at it, and I can hardly cope being around that because no matter what I try to do there’s a flickering screen trying to burrow into my eyeballs. And when it’s anything genuinely meant to move the viewer, it does so to me disproportionately. I know it’s not real, at a minimum because it’s not right there, and often because it’s acted and scripted, but something deep inside me insists that because I can see it happening, it matters. Typically, given what everybody else likes to watch, people are there on screen suffering in some way, physically or emotionally, and the TV is poking me in the eye with sheer unpleasantness.

Then, related, is the spoon-feeding.

One of the things that I love about books is that the writer has to leave a lot to the reader, so when I read I am in control. Most obviously, what happens is in my head, not in front of my eyes, which means it has a different sort of reality, one that is mine. I’ve done part of the work, so it means more but also I can set it up or let it go as I please. More subtly, the pace is up to me. I’m a fast reader and can devour huge chunks if I wish, or slow down and savour parts, or skim what isn’t engaging me.

I found, and still find, TV to be like sitting in a chair and having someone push a meal into my mouth. It may be a gourmet meal, but NOW I’m getting the peas and I’d better chew them at the right speed because here comes the steak and it’s on the director’s timetable, not mine. I find it very tough to relax and let someone else control the experience to that extent. Once the entertainment pipe is spouting, it does its thing.

Then there’s advertising, which I utterly despise and would wipe from the face of the Earth, so enough said about that.

So I have slowly concluded that I literally experience the world differently to the average person of my age, even now. I read the TV reviews in various publications so I’m not crippled when people want to talk to me about what matters to them. But more than ever, the world revolves around video on screens these days, and I’m not wired for it.

I see there is research suggesting that having grown up reading instead of watching may have advantaged me in certain respects, for learning and complex reasoning and other things that are held to be good things … but I am a man adrift, more obviously, the person jumping at shadows others haven’t noticed, and flinching at sounds that burst on my ears and are background noise to everybody else. Increasingly so, as almost everywhere that has been a text respite feels compelled to turn to video to keep up with a population that hardly knows anything else.

This hasn’t gone away as I expected it would with time.

Two – plenty of death

Next is something that is rarely talked about, and people find uncomfortable. Bear with me. It may seem weird, but I have come to think that in spite of being unacknowledged and largely unseen, it’s a difference that’s important.

I was well into adulthood before I realised that most people my age had never seen a dead person.

Apart from on screen, of course, where they’re ten a penny.

I grew up in an intense community of a few hundred people who were around each other all the time. And in a group of people that size, multi-generational, people die quite regularly for all the usual reasons. Every time anyone did, all of us went to the funeral, and we all paid our respects.

So I have no idea how many times that happened in my life, but randomness being what it is, sometimes it was every few weeks. As far back into my childhood as my memory goes.

Is this weird yet?

For me it isn’t, and the fact that it’s uncomfortable for others took me quite a while to pick up on. The modern Western world seems to have mostly sanitised actual death out of existence, the actual thing and how it affects actual people, and so a lot of people appear not to know how to deal with it.

This may be just me, but I suspect it’s difficult to keep thinking of death as terrible and scary enough to avoid thinking and talking about when it’s always been a part of life. When there has been ritual, everybody knowing what is done, compassion for those left bereaved, beliefs around death and what it means … and, above all, regularity and repetition. When you’ve seen people slip away or be snatched away, shocking, sad, or a blessed release, seen it always dealt with by those who remain, and seen life go on.

Death is final in the sense of the individual, but for anyone embedded in a community it’s as much a part of life as anything else, and one that teaches us a lot about our own life, if we let it.

Meanwhile, it often seems to me now that death in this sense has been swept under the carpet of modern life, and been replaced by something else that people find easier to deal with.

And this is where TV comes back into it, because as we see less and less death in real life, it becomes more and more of a plot point in our entertainment. We’re desensitised to death on the screen, and over-sensitive to the real thing. Death is the object in games, death is the hook in drama, possible pending death is the suspense to keep us watching. And if anyone we know is dealing with a death close to them we don’t know what to say.

None of this is to lecture anybody or to make any particular point. I don’t know what it means, but I’ve written this because it feels as though it means something.

And, as it probably obvious, I feel an outsider in ways that mostly don’t show and sometimes need to let that feeling out.