My wish for you this holiday

My wish for you this holiday is pretty much the same as my wish for myself. Spend December gazing out at the trees waving in the distance, hear the cicadas screeching in the nearby bushes and then, when the sun hits its zenith, plunge into a cool pool of turquoise.

Or don’t. Can you imagine being such a rebel that you’re also a Christmas rebel, and you refuse to have fun in December. 

Rather obliterate. It’s better to be comatose beside the pool, than lining up at the restaurant door. There’s no joy in waiting for a table to become available at your kids’ favourite franchise. If I rebel against anything over the holidays it’s precisely this.

There’s something wonderful about long summer nights that begin when the sun is still in the sky. There’s something magical about passing through a toll gate in the country, then seeing the road open up for hundreds of kilometres before you. 

It’s a funny thing, how many landscape artists have pictured the open road. The image is like a country song turned into two dimensional metaphor. Freedom is suddenly found between petrol stations, as though we’re not already drowning from the litre price we’ll pay at the next stop.

Trouble is, none of the world’s problems were ever solved by uttering the words, ‘gimme a break.