I'm not kidding about The Television

Let me make one thing plain from this here outset. I did not open a book for pleasure until I was, oh, about 15. All I did before that was watch TV. So I know the lovely luxury of switching off as you switch it on. I know the intoxicating escapism of the medium. Believe me.

But these days, Jesus. All I ever seem to want to watch are snippets from iView and ABC News24. Even when I have a television at my disposal—when I'm languishing on someone else's couch, say—I turn to freaking News24.

Why I can't sit down to watch The Block or Masterchef or The Voice or Grand fucking Designs like the rest of the world, I have no idea. I am re-watching Deadwood on DVD, but that's like one episode at a time, a couple of times a week, max.

So maybe I watch four hours of moving pictures a week at the outside. I do like movies; I just don't seem to get time to watch them.

I know what you're thinking: what the hell do I do with my evenings? By way of retort, let me say I would rather die than surf the channels nightly, looking for "something good on". I would rather die than get the paper for the sake of the Green Guide (I know people who still do this. People with the Web connected to their very homes. I'm not kidding). I would rather die, these days, than give up my nights at home, any of then really, to The Television.

What I do when I have an evening at home—and there are, say, four a week—is:

write; light the fire, then stare into it; wash dishes; play records; mail-order seeds, books, cheese cultures, music, or wine yeast; clean the chainsaw; make cocktails; mend things; cook; turn the incubating eggs; thin seedlings; write personal email to my closest charmers; Skype if the stars align; go to bed with a rum and read.

Far from the days of Gilligan and Solid Gold, I've become so abstracted from TV/series culture that I literally cannot understand how people go home and turn it on and sit down in front of it every night, let alone put it on in the mornings. You'd think that living alone I'd be glad to have it babbling—for the company, as people say—but I'd much rather listen to the wind and the frogs and the odd cow lowing in the valley.

I don't know what's happened to me. But I'm really, seriously, not kidding about The Television.