Boxing clever: Elizabeth Day

A luxurious weekend in a country hotel with every need catered for – except the desire to watch television. Plus, do we really need to upload every aspect of our lives?

I like to think I'm a fairly tolerant person. I'm not, obviously, but I still like to think it. In truth, as I get older the list of things that disproportionately annoy me gets longer. Grammatical errors. Tourists who walk too slowly down busy London thoroughfares. Pregnant women who wear "Baby on board" badges when travelling on public transport. That kind of thing. By the time I'm 85, I'll doubtless be writing green ink letters in the nursing home, furiously muttering: "Different from, not different to" as Eastern European nurses try to spoon mushed-up apple through the gaps in my teeth.

The other day I stumbled across another irritant when my boyfriend and I went to stay in a rambling hotel in a bucolic part of the English countryside. Everything about it was impeccable. But in our bedroom there was no television. The welcome brochure informed us that this was because the owners wanted to encourage their guests to unwind and contemplate, not because they were too cheap to fork out for a flat screen.

My immediate reaction was to think: "Why of course. How terribly chavvy of me to want to watch the bumper Sunday edition of Come Dine With Me when I could be discussing philosophy or reading Proust." But then it struck me that a hotel should be about relaxation. And for me, watching television is relaxing. I don't see why I should be made to feel bad about this by a misplaced cultural snobbery that dictates TV is somehow Not Quite The Done Thing.

Of course, in the same hotel room, there was a working radio. Why is the assumption that listening rather than watching is somehow less intrusive, less brain-rotting? I suspect it's because listening to the wireless is seen as an altogether more tasteful activity, one redolent of English period dramas where families gather round the fireplace to hear Winston Churchill declare war on Germany.

But what if I'd tuned into an underground grime radio station and spent the weekend assaulting my eardrums with rappers exhorting me to pop a cap in someone's ass? Would that have been better than whiling away a pleasant half-hour watching the Antiques Roadshow?

There is plenty of mind-numbing dross on television. There is also lots of high-quality programming. I like to watch a bit of both. This does not diminish my ability to consider life's Big Questions (such as: should Kat from EastEnders really wear that much eyeliner?), nor does it make me an illiterate moron.

In the end, not having a television in our room left us feeling resentful rather than relaxed. And when we returned home the next day, it was impossible to work out what was happening in Waking the Dead.

I wonder whether our view of the world is being altered by our constant need to capture experiences on screen. It's no longer enough just to sit, watch and take things in: we need to record ourselves in the act.

I was walking along the cliffs in Cornwall last week (note to reader: this makes my life sound more idyllic than it is) when I came across a pair of intertwined grass snakes dozing on a rock in the sunshine. After emitting the obligatory girly shriek, my instinct was to take a photo on my cameraphone and upload it on to Facebook. It was as though the encounter would only be validated if I shared it with people who could make comments punctuated by emotions and exclamation marks.

I spent a few minutes simply looking at the snakes, without feeling any particular need to click on a thumbs-up sign to denote how much I "liked" them. But it did remind me of the dispiriting tale of a friend who, when walking on Hampstead Heath, stopped to admire the view. "Wow," he said appreciatively. "That looks exactly like my screensaver."

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