Danielle de Valera

“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” * It’s Boxing Day. Christmas is over for another year, and I couldn’t be happier. Celebrating a winter solstice festival in the middle of the Australian summer is no picnic. ‘Tis a wearisome business, more like hard work.

The toads are out, drunken bogans are in plague proportions, and the ants have organised themselves into raiding parties – they seem particularly fond of cat food. In the horror run-up to Christmas, we drip with sweat as we rip open cards showing snow scenes while the thermometer climbs into the 40s and the radio dispenses songs about chestnuts roasting on open fires, and sleigh bells — most of us have never seen a chestnut or heard  a sleigh bell, but there y’ go. ‘Tis the season for psychosis, tra la la la la, la la la la.

I had been going to celebrate the arrival of Boxing Day by taking the cats into the torn-apart-and-put-together study tonight and watching a little junk TV while I mended my rags, but I’ve discovered the TV is on the blink. I haven’t seen any TV since The Great Python Debacle of 5th December (see previous blog), when I was forced to leave the study so precipitously; all I’ve done since is make one-hour sorties into the room to keep in touch with people on the net, clean, and throw out the things that had  accumulated under the stairs in the last 14 years — old computers, keyboards, printers, scanners, plus mucho miscellaneous stuff, and empty boxes I thought would come in handy sometime, you know the syndrome.

It’s impossible to get a tech to the house at this time of year so I must go on contenting myself with radio. At least, they’ve stopped playing Christmas songs. I’ve had a horror of Christmas since I fell ill with diptheria when I was 18 months old and spent the whole Christmas fighting for my life in a hospital bed. In those days (we’re talking millions of years ago, tiny cats), parents weren’t allowed into the wards on the grounds that their leaving at the end of visiting time would upset the children. Ho. Instead, the children had to contend with what must have seemed to them (it certainly seemed so to me) like total abandonment by everyone they had ever trusted and loved. Every so often, to provide some light relief from my misery, three strangers, dressed all in white and wearing masks, would come into my room, hold me down and paint my throat. Merry Christmas, Kid.

To change the subject, lately I’ve become possessed of some kind of death ray for electrical objects. Show me anything that runs on electricity and I can disable it. Currently, my washing machine is playing up, the TV won’t work, my computer is taking 15 minutes to access documents or the net and, last week, when I went to iron the dress I’d bought for my daughter for Christmas, the iron blew up! Partly, I suppose, it’s the result of living so near the sea, but I’m convinced that it’s also partly me. It’s an expensive quality to have: a veritable parade of technicians will be required to put this place back into working order. But all that is days away; you couldn’t get a tech today if your life depended on it. They’ve all turned off their mobiles, the better to enjoy their hangovers — them and the rest of Australia. Now we are in the beautiful hiatus that comes between Christmas and New Year. No need to worry about plans and how to implement them in the coming year, no need to struggle to fulfil expectations, yours or anyone else’s; just a beautiful seven days in which to recover from what my daughter calls ‘the season of psychosis’.

I do love Boxing Day. And the icing on the cake is — it’s raining.

May 2013 bring you your heart’s desire.

* Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

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