Happy Christmas folks...

So I had a different christmas, my first away from home at the ripe old age of 28. And as such it wasn't a christmas, I talked with the family while huddled in an alcove in the dark and rain on a beach on the other side of the world as they stood around waiting for my whimsical red wine wanderings to end so they could go open their pressies. From the start our little band of away-from-homers made a decent effort to make the occasion christmasy. We opened the day with a smoked salmon, cream cheese and brown bread breakfast, washed down with a cheap Baileys substitute. Seagulls hovered in the wind around us like we were returning trawlers. And us sprawled in the sun, our short sleeved shirts another effort to formalise it all. Then later, in a cave more used to student booze ups than buffet dinners, we served up a christmas fare of boiled ham, potatoes, sweetcorn and peas, pineapple, onions, stuffing and red, red wine. It was quite delicious but for me, try as we might, christmas did not come to the remote beach in New Zealand. For me, christmas is a ten day stretch, if not the whole month of december, where I get to see all those people who I haven't seen, maybe since the previous christmas. And I get to sit around with my big family and make the same jokes we've made for years and which, unlike us perhaps, never seem to grow old.

I am currently road tripping here, with surf boards on the roof and bikes racked to the back, wobbling our way along the coast in a top heavy van. So far the bikes remain unused, their chains rusting in the salty air as we chase the surf. I am new to this surfing game and I suck momentously. The water is head freeze cold, as fresh as the melting ice caps it comes from. I fittingly use a shambles of a wetsuit with some of one leg missing, a hole the size of my fist in the crotch and a sleeveless upper body like a girls one piece swimming costume. To counteract this I wear a hood which isolates me further from the others as I struggle in a very private battle with my board. Catching a wave is all well and good when I can barely sit on the thing. Each time I am swept off it brings the same instant angry frustration as stubbing your toe, and I shout and curse this great unwieldy ironing board I am trying to master. My shouts are impotent, lost in the rumble and ssssssh of the waves and it only makes me all the more exhausted. On occasion sheets of rain sweep across us, the wind whips the white tops up and I feel a little bit homesick, chilled to my core, an Irish winter's day in a New Zealand summer.

On the beach recovering, I watch a couple of small yellow-eyed penguins make their waddling way up the sand dunes. For some reason they remind me of an old married couple struggling back uphill from the shops, the woman leading the way and nattering away about this and that ( "Oooh I see the cormorants are back for christmas, and I have nothing for them..."), the husband patiently, silently walking in her wake, both their heads craning forwards as if crossing a finishing line.

In the evening I watch the sun set behind a small headland, great rays of light, like a snapshot of an explosion, light up the gathered clouds in a pink glow. The faces of the illuminated clouds seem to look into the suns cauldron with awe, its contents hidden tantalisingly from me, where I stand has gone dark and cold. I suspect a man less burdened by facts and figures could spend a fulfilling life trying to see into that cauldron, to see for himself what the clouds hold in such reverence.

I got a rugby ball stuck in the tree where we were camping, the same tree we hung our wetsuits from like upside down scarecrows who agitate in the wind, creepy in the dusk. I threw a variety of small hard objects up the tree to retrieve the ball and not all of them came back down. Occasionally a gust of wind would dislodge one and it would thump down unexpectedly like a rogue coin in those waterfall-coin games at the amusements. Not all of them came down though, and I like to think it is my legacy at that spot. If they do fall, and do hit someone, i can only hope that it is one of those people who feels obliged to leave a legacy of beer bottles and one-use barbecues. I have given Mother Nature the ammunition, it is up to her now.

We ate christmas dinner with a Czech couple. Their traditional christmas dinner involves carp. The carp is often left to swim for several days in the family bath tub to clear the mud out of its gills. Apparently many of the carp are saved by the tearful last minute intervention of the family children, who are unwilling to celebrate christmas by eating their new found friend. I am sure if we did the same with all the animals we eat over christmas there'd me more than a few disgruntled fathers on christmas day, grumbling quietly as they push their sprouts and soy-based ham (Sham) around their plates, while the kids happily charge around the garden slipping in fresh pig shit. Best christmas ever, they'd say.