Let’s dive in

Husband-and-wife comedians and commentators Jeremy Elwood and Michele A’Court share their views.

Some people like to ease themselves into the working year, others prefer to plunge. My preference would be to gaze at it from a distance for as long as possible, waiting for other people to shout reassurances like: “It’s fine, really, once you get in.”

The good people who designed our statutory holiday calendar took a Finnish sauna approach to the first quarter – dive in, get out and relax, jump back in. Waitangi Day and regional anniversaries give us a couple of long weekends, and then Easter (early this year) and Anzac Day briefly soothe us into autumn.

We’re bloody on our own in winter. Sure, we save up our official celebration of the Queen’s birthday (she’s a Taurus) till June (Gemini time) – our one tiny respite during that long plod to Labour Weekend when we toss off our cardies and plant tomatoes, and tell ourselves spring has arrived. Invariably, we spend the following weekend retrieving our woollies from underbed storage and shifting seedlings to windowsills indoors.

But that’s months away, and I’m sorry I mentioned it. Where I am, in Christchurch, the golden weather appears nowhere near ending. I’m starting my year with a hiss and a roar at the World Buskers Festival – 12 shows in 11 days – relishing the chance to create and polish, and focus on the work I love best.

Here’s what I plan to do any time I feel overwhelmed by my “to do” list in the next little while: I’m going to imagine being the prime minister. A country to run, and a new human to create. Granted, she’s doing what working mothers have done for decades and – as she says – with more help and support than many.

What I’m not going to do is offer Jacinda advice. Crikey, if hot reckons were baby booties, she and Clarke could dress a centipede, and it’s only January. When Rocket Lab shot its Electron rocket into orbit last Sunday, that wasn’t because a bunch of people who had kind of made a rocket once and almost got it right offered them an old blueprint. You find your own path.

Instead, I’m going to see what I can learn from her. Because the way we’ve traditionally arranged our households and workforces hasn’t caught up with where we are, and it’s going to take changes in legislation, social attitudes, and political will to move things along.

So you could think of the First Baby as a top-level fact-finding mission into one of the most human of experiences. Because we like our political leaders to be human, and also organised, focused multi-taskers in touch with real life, pressures, and issues. At which point I think we’ve just described a working parent.

We really do start the working year in the most Kiwi manner possible. Get stuck in, do five days for a week or two, then think: “Hell, that’s a bit much! I reckon I’ll ease back a bit and do four days for a couple of weeks.” Then pull ourselves together to do the full five again for a while before taking four days off to eat chocolate.

You can throw into the mix the fact that we manage to convince ourselves that things have changed while we’ve been away. The traffic in January is a nightmare, with people taking days to remember where their indicators are, and only slowly coming to the realisation that yes, the same roads you took before Christmas, to the same place, with the same other people, really do take the same amount of time that they did before the holidays. Brace yourself, commuters, the school runs haven’t even started yet.

So perhaps the days off are necessary, to give everyone a chance to step back, ease in and take a slow run-up to the working year. I agree with Michele, though, that a few statutory days off to light the fire and thaw out in the middle of winter would be fantastic.

This is all relatively new to me. My Januarys past have been a blend of enjoying an extended summer punctuated by the occasional comedy show, with the frisson of knowing that I overspent over the summer and my income stream wouldn’t normally start properly until February.

That isn’t the case this year. I find myself in the unusual (for me) situation of going back to a job I had last year. I’m back in a familiar office, working with the same good people, making a television show that I understand the mechanics of.

Uncertainty was a way of life for me as a freelancer for many years, and I became comfortable with it, but for a lot of people it isn’t that simple. For many, 2018 will be starting as a daunting prospect – another year of trying to make ends meet, searching for regular (or, indeed, any) work, wondering how to pay for rent or food for yourself and your dependants.

So when I get frustrated, tired, annoyed or disappointed this year – which I will; we all will, that’s the nature of any year – I’m going to try to remember that there are people who would gladly take the hours I don’t want to put in, would gratefully accept the frustrations of getting to any job, because it would mean they actually had one to get to.

Unless you cut me off in rush hour traffic without indicating. Then, you’re on your own.