Passing the holiday baton

We could, perhaps, think of it as some sort of relay race. You have done your bit, and now you can pass the baton to me, and it will be my turn.

Because, while most of you were away, laying on your asses on sunny beaches, eating too much tucker, indulging in all manner of shameless binge drinking with friends and family, I have been at work, diligently bolting verbs to adjectives and nouns.

While you have been driving to beautiful summer spots to do a whole lot of bugger all, my surroundings and daily tasks have remained drearily familiar.

While you’ve been waking up late in hotels or tents or baches, pondering the possibilities of fishing trips and picnics, I have been rising at 7am, heaving a big gusty sigh and trudging into my home office to generate yards of press-worthy prose.

But I get the last laugh, because now the tables are turned.

It is your turn to yawn and sigh and head off back to work, battling your way through traffic that crawls as slowly as cholesterol through a Christmas-clogged artery, your shoulders still stinging with sunburn as a cruel reminder of fun times now behind you, your brain sunk in a fug of post-holiday depression. And it is my turn to go bush. Around the time you read this on Sunday morning, I’ll be on a water taxi, a salty breeze chucking fine sea spray in my smug face as I thrash up the coast of Abel Tasman National Park, attended by a train of leaping dolphins.

By lunchtime, my porky frame will be bobbing in the lagoon at Torrent Bay, the air around me scented with the resinous waft of ngaio, manuka, and mingi-mingi.

By 2pm, I will have a book in one hand and a gin in the other.

Around 5pm, the barbecue will be fired up to feed a tribe of kids who’ll rapidly become semi-feral over the coming week, hooning up and down the bush tracks, brown as dung beetles, and endlessly flinging themselves off the jetty into a world of lapping green brine.

While you are dealing with the usual workplace irritations – long hours, tedious tasks, pedantic emails from middle management – I will be dealing with challenges specific to beachside holidays: wet togs chaffing your thighs, the fiendish glare of the sun off the bay, dwindling supplies of ice and tonic, eye strain from reading too many books, the twilight incursions of sandflies.

To those who took their holidays at the usual time, my commiserations that they’re over. I hope you had a brilliant time away, but it’s comforting to have you back now, keeping the wheels of industry turning.

And chin up. There’ll be other holidays.

In 12 months time, you can do it all over again. In the meantime, the next shift of holiday-makers is ready to head away. It’s time to pass the baton to me.

To those who took their holidays at the usual time, my commiserations that they're over.