Giles Coren: 'I went to buy a paper. There was a cow in the road'

This year, for the first time in my life, I am not spending Christmas in London. I am spending it, God help me, in the countryside. And I’m hating it.

Have you ever been to the countryside? It’s so small. And there’s nothing to do. And the shops all close over the holidays so you can’t just nip out for booze when you run low in the middle of lunch. You have to have cunningly remembered to ferment turnips in a barrel of bogwater in September.

And there’s no traditional Domino’s pizza at midnight on Christmas Eve when you roll back hammered from the pub round the corner. Oh no, because Domino’s does not deliver out here. Because the little geezer on his moped is scared of horses. And sheep. And anyway, you haven’t rolled back hammered from the pub round the corner after singing traditional Christmas pub songs (like ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’), because the pub is not round the corner. Because there aren’t any corners. The pub is seven miles away. Which means you can’t roll home from it drunk or you’ll end up being that bloke who every year dies of exposure in a hedge after trying to walk home from the pub on Christmas Eve and they don’t find him till the snow melts in April.

Unless you roll home from it in the car. Which is what they all do round here. But which I’m not doing because weirdly I think it is dangerous (nobody in the countryside is bothered by the law). They all go, ‘It bain’t dangerous!’ But it be. It totally be. It be why life expectancy in the countryside is about five years lower than in cities, despite all the fresh air and exercise: because they are constantly driving into trees on Christmas Eve when bladdered on dirty cider and cheap speed.

And then… wait, hang on. What was that hooting sound? Was that an owl? It’s so dark here at night without all the streetlights. There’s this endless howling and scuttling and screeching from the woods. No wonder they all carry guns. It’s not for hunting, it’s for self-defence. I went to try and buy a newspaper this morning and there was a cow in the road. An actual cow. So obviously I came home again. That’s why they’re all so bone ignorant out here: they’re too scared to go out and buy a paper.

And then if you do survive until Christmas Day, the broadband is so slow that you can’t do the traditional Christmas morning thing of getting immediately online to snap up bargains in the sales, because by the time your online store of choice has refreshed the page (making that special 1990s dial-up whirring noise) some slick mofo in Luton with his own server has snaffled the last 50" flatscreen for under a monkey.

And you can’t even sit and have a quiet read on Christmas morning because the church bells are all ringing at the tops of their voices for absolutely no reason whatsoever. And there’s no looking forward to going to QPR’s traditional Boxing Day London derby (which this year is at Arsenal so literally only a mile from my front door) because that is 100 miles away. So if you want footie you have to go and watch Lower Trollop against Arsehampton Rovers or something: a load of fat white village men chasing a ball across a muddy field, as if football was ever meant to be anything like that.

And you can’t watch it on the telly because Virgin won’t lay cables out here. And you can’t go next door and ask them if they’ve got satellite because next door is a frigging cattle shed, with nothing but a load of shepherds standing around, peering into a manger at a baby who is, in the freakiest possible way, not even crying, while weirdly-dressed foreign geezers keep arriving with some of the shittest presents you’ve ever seen.

I mean, Jesus. How un-Christmassy is that?