Oh January!

Gotta love January in Victoria. Are other places – other western world places – like this? Is London like this in August? Is Paris?

First couple of weeks after Christmas, seems like everybody’s gone to the beach. It’s a great time to be in Melbourne – no traffic, no car parking problems, no queues in your favourite café. Quiet in the morning, when usually there is the rev and roar of cars getting to school and work.

At the beach, the best side of humanity is on display. Families with two parents have both on duty – workload halved. Dads abound on the sand and in the water, doing physical stuff with their kids – surfing and playing beach cricket and building castles. Every kid I’ve ever known has loved the outdoors. In summer, at the seaside, little kids who normally spend their days in a frenzy of being ferried from crèche to calisthenics to little aths to home, get to do what comes naturally, with their unusually relaxed parents a benign presence. I’ve spent many weeks people-watching at the beach over the years; I’m yet to hear a cross word or see a tantrum.

I love that so many Australians seem to think it’s fine to abandon their office and maybe even their phone (okay, that might be taking it a little far) in the knowledge that the world can very well go on without their constant vigilance. I love that for at least the two weeks after Christmas, the only thing anyone gets really het up about is the cricket. Nothing is so important that it can’t wait.

Of course the dark side of this is the much (and rightly) criticised Australian apathy. The positive side is that in general, Aussies don’t think much is worth dying for. For someone who, as a kid, was caught in a train in the middle of a rock-throwing mob protesting about the official language, for someone in whose home city 6,000 people were killed in the streets because they were the wrong religion, apathy has a lot going for it. I wonder if the fact that we have no wars here has anything to do with our willingness to let the world spin on for a fortnight or a month, as we drift in a happy indulgence of sport, detective novels and barbeques. Granted, this isn’t the most sophisticated analysis, but hey, it’s still January, and my brain is on holiday.

After two weeks at the beach, I return to my city office, happy to be in air-conditioned comfort and out of the ferocious heat. And there’s still a bit of a holiday vibe. There’s precious little in the email inbox. I’m not as strict about when I get to work and when I leave, I dress more casually. There are hardly any meetings; I have time to clear my virtual and hard copy files, throw out a heap of paperwork, update the data bases I never find time to do, set myself up for when the crazy normal hits in February. At home, I don’t even bother to blog.

Then, as if four weeks of comparative sloth were not enough, January ends with a public holiday. This year my bloke and I flew to Canberra for a wedding. We stayed in a nice hotel and gorged on massive buffet breakfasts. We took a boat tour of the lake, in a tiny craft, guided by Jim, an old salt in shorts and a cap, with skinny legs, knobbly knees and a handle-bar moustache that joined up with the best mutton chops I’ve seen in a long time. We walked beside the lake. We visited some of the many free things in our national capital; at the National Museum we enjoyed a vibrantly enthusiastic talk from the curator of ‘Old Masters’, a collection of extraordinary bark paintings from Arnhem Land. The nights and mornings were crisp and fresh and we sat in soft Canberra sunshine and drank coffee.

At the wedding, a Sri Lankan-Anglo combo, most of the women, even the Anglos were ‘saried up’ (even sari is a verb now it seems) and we danced the night away with everyone from tiny boys in silk kurta-pyjamas to their grand-parents, jiving enthusiastically to Nutbush City Limits and Tamil movie hits.

Starting tomorrow, life with return to its usual bustle and rush. Kids will be back at school, the traffic will be horrendous, the schedule of meetings as heavy as ever. But I carry January with me for a while. And the conviction that as long as we can continue to realise for a short period each year that no one is indispensable and that everyone needs a break, we will be reminded our smallness in the scheme of things and not take ourselves too seriously.

Comments

[Rod]

Welcome back Clare. I hope your January blissfulness lasts for the rest of the year and I look forward to having my year punctuated by little lights of blog along the way.