Giles Coren

Have you ever been to the countryside? It's so small. And there's nothing to do.

My dad Alan loved Westerns and we watched them together when there wasn't much else on TV. I had toy cowboys I'd call Richard Widmark or Gregory Peck and we'd restage the Battle of the Alamo.

Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.

As a broadly left-wing, environmentally aware urban believer in anthropogenic global warming, I am all for a total ban on motor vehicles.

When I was 16 my dad taught me to drive too. Furiously. Unable to understand why I couldn't already do it - for driving, to him, was innate in the human. It was what separated us from the apes. And from the French, who weren't much good at it either.

Hipsters being hipsters, coolness and inaccessibility have overtaken all other concerns. Food no longer matters. Even burgers are too foody. All a restaurant needs to be now is a place with bricks and exposed plumbing where you can take an edgy selfie that will make your friends feel like they are missing out.

It doesn't matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.

Being a success in the world, having total control of one's life, is about being able to take or leave things.

There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.

But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.

People like me make modern life intolerable.

I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn't. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection. We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.

I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn't have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.

I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.

I always say what I think to be amusing.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.

All I care about is that people who like me think I'm funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.