There is not one person saying, ''My God, Christmas is just around the corner and I am completely unprepared.'' On the contrary, the shops - of which there are tens of thousands, all with different stuff in them - appear to be full of people with forearms filled with shopping bags. And wrapping paper. It's December 4, people. Chill.

Actually, that's hardly an instruction they need to have. Every morning is about zero degree.

Absolutely no-one has mentioned prawns to me. Not once. There is no discussion of one's fishmarket strategy. And in order to find decent ice-cream in containers bigger than 150 millilitres, I need to go a specialist store. Apparently, it is different in summer, where even the daggiest supermarkets sell ice-cream, just not as we know it. The butchers are filled with turkeys, all piled one on top of another. Plump. Whole. Not frozen. There is not a stuffed turkey breast in sight. There are also pigeons and guinea fowl.

Yes, in England, the word traditional appears more often than the word pub - although the two often appear together. It's my first time here - well, the first time in 40 years and I can barely remember it from then. I was the reluctant teenager dragged along on a family holiday in England and all I can remember is feeling very resentful about the weather and the enforced removal from friends over the long Australian summer. Maybe I was a spoiled brat or maybe I just wasn't any good at being good.

Now I'm the teenager my mother thought I should be. Alert. Enthusiastic. Dashing from one historic palace to another and feeling absolutely no resistance to the concept of historic re-enactment. This is a complete surprise to the cynical journalist in me. At Hampton Court, there is a woman fiddling with her bodice and muttering that her servants are not around when she needs them. Normally, I'd tell someone like this to get a grip but it turns out she's an aunt of Katherine Howard, second beheaded wife of Henry VIII. She tells me she is concerned because she fears Katherine is having an affair.

It's more captivating than Downton Abbey. Much more. DA has the slight tendency to make everything look pretty simple (hang on, old chap, while I pop back briefly from the Great War). Whereas this particular aunt takes me through what she fears will be the gruesome end for her niece and the harrowing isolation of members of her family. If that isn't enough, a Beefeater takes us through the Tower, whispering the ravens; and then I get to slide along the green seats in the House of Commons. It's the way they get their dead to speak in Britain that makes the history so alive, although my children, lazing in cossies halfway across the world, are mocking the social studies lessons which they say have come half a century too late.

And then, in Oxford, I stumble across Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral. It's the first one in Advent (I'm sure I'm making some hideous liturgical error here but think of me as a religious tourist). There are other temptations on in this university town - an international choir singing Christmas carols and a piano recital. But the site of Christ Church has had prayer and worship for around a thousand years. Don't think there were soaring vaults back then, no 16 little boys dressed in white and scarlet. But it's the kid sitting nearest me who has me transfixed. He is sitting just a metre away and is pulling at the sleeve of his smock. And when he's not doing that, he is picking the skin around his fingernails. Or having a scratch. He's got the eye of the person who looks to be head chorister and that eye is bearing down fiercely. For a minute, maybe two, the kid is still again.

This continues during the entire service. Except when he's singing, when he has a voice like a flute played in tune but just a little deeper. That's when he is behaving just like everyone else.

It's only because He Who Must Not Be Written About is with me that I don't rush up to both child and head chorister to say, you know, he's going to be OK. Just don't go off your head at him every time he plays up. It's not as if fidgeting is going to kill anyone.

And I know that the only reason I feel so intently about this is because I was that little boy. Actually, more properly, like that little boy. I'd love to save his mum and his dad and himself all the tears and worries they are going to have over the next 10 or 15 years as he wriggles his way in and out of trouble, just to explain that no matter how much strife he gets into, he will still end up OK.

A little soppy in the head when it comes to British history and adults playing dress-ups - but OK. Plus, sadly, my singing is still rubbish.

■ Follow me on Twitter @jennaprice or email jenna_p@bigpond.net.au.