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Although it should be called "the bloody stupid season" as end-of-year office parties, Christmas parties, barbecues... they stretch out before us until some time in mid-January when we surface several kilos heavier and a few brain cells lighter and try to reorganise our shattered lives.
It's unavoidable and every year it seems to go on longer You can feel it starting around about Melbourne Cup day, it gathers momentum in December and then the next thing you know you're standing in someone's garden singing Auld Lang Syne with your pants around your ankles oblivious to the fact that your so-called mates are capturing the whole sorry episode on the video camera they were given for Christmas and that come March you'll be beaten by a water-skiing poodle on Australia's Funniest Home Videos. It's all too horrific!
And how am I so sure of this? Well, I have the headache to prove it. We had our office end-of-year bash last night. Or should I say, yesterday afternoon. The night bit came when some moron said: "Let's grab a few slabs and head back to my place." My wife reliably informs me that the moron in question was me. She's also provided me with a list of people I have to apologise to over the next few days.
Mind you though, I don't particularly feel like it. Why is it that the easiest way to feel badly towards your friends is to load them up with booze and let them run amok in your house. I've spent the morning retrieving half-empty stubbies in a bizarre version of an Easter egg hunt. Look kids - extra points for beers with cigarette butts in them.
Oh, and did I mention that while at the office I gave a speech? Never do this unless you want to spend the rest of the night apologising to people who you forgot, or if you really want to make a dork of yourself by thanking some guy in accounts who left six months ago (no-one told me).
And there's more to come; The next few weeks promise lots of opportunities to make myself a social leper and you can bet I, like the rest of you, will be diving head first into them. Even the cat has been looking at me all day with an expression that seems to say: 'You were talking crap last night. I swear if you didn't feed me I'd be out of here." That reminds me: I'd better apologise to the neighbours about the tuneless version of Working Class Man that was performed by a male choir and bongos just before sunrise.
Speaking of music, why is that when left to their own devices, your mates bypass all your decent CDs and find the Best Of Meatloaf that's hidden down the back of the cupboard.
A lot of people say that we've forgotten that Christmas is a religious festival, that we've lost the soul of Christmas in commercialism and partying. Not me, I never feel more religious than I do at this time of year. You see; I was born a Catholic and for the next few weeks I'm going to be feeling very, very guilty.
You spend your childhood resenting those lucky buggers running around with the new Hot Wheels set in the middle of July, knowing that when it's your turn in December your going to get tracks one week and the cars a few weeks later. Then you reach my age and you spend the whole year chipping in for office birthday gifts and, guess what - when it's your turn everyone on holiday. Not fair, not fair!
So anyway, we go over and look at the baby. I've got nothing against babies. sure, they make alot of noise but if you crank up the stereo you can hardly hear them (I hasten to add these are babies in neighbours' houses). And they're kind of cute. That is if you regard cute as being the result of Churchill and Ghandi spending a lusty night in a hotel room.
And seeing i don't produce milk, they have no real intrest in me. Me and babies have a live and let live sort of arrangement. So I wave at the baby and it blinks a couple of times so I fell I've made contact and then I go outside and have a cigarette.
That's the other thing about babies - they make their previously chain smoking parents banish any adult who looks like lighting up to the next suburb. I know it's a disgusting habit but so is throwing up on strangers and giong to the toilet in your pants but no one ever chastises the baby.
Did I mention I bought the baby a gift? I thought, "what does a new born baby boy want? A full size football, yeah that'd be neat".
The parents were gracious. Dad was so happy he ran into the street and started kicking the ball around, grinning with that big dumb smile that all men do when a new peice of sporting equipment is brought into the home.
But when I've told people, they've said: "That's an odd choice for a baby, what's he going to do with that?"
I'll tell you what he's going to do with it., he's going to ignore it with the same way he ignores the twirling bloody mobile thing you bought him or the purple dinosaur night light that looks like it was designed by colour blind psycopaths on acid. The same way he ignores anything which isn't vaguely shaped like a breast, speaking of which, if we turn the ball pointy side towards his mouth he might just suck all the air out of it.
At least my gift is vaguely the right shape. and what the hell, he might use the footy to start early visual reinforcement, resulting in one day growing up to be a great Wallaby legend, first on hand to give his Uncle Mikey tickets to the World Cup. Then we'll see who's laughing Mr and Mrs "we bought the baby a mobile".
For a start, it wasn't hot. It was about 22 degrees each day (four degrees cooler than Sydney was) and bloody cold at night. Even colder if, like me, you'd packed only shorts and T-shirts. The flight was not all that long. In fact, the only thing that made it seem so long was the bloody awful Jackie Chan movie we were forced to endure.
Now the first thing that struck me was how green it was. Deserts my big fat bum... there was plant life everywhere and it was absolutely gorgeous. If you go, be sure to have a beer at Bojangles, a great bar where I actually got up and played bush bass with the band. I've stil got the blood blisters to prove it.
The depressing thing was how few Australians were there. German backpackers were so prevalent you'dswear they'd gone feral and were breeding out in the scrub. Our hotel was so full of elderly American tourists we started calling it "God's waiting room".
The thing that gets me about the aging American tourist, is that they never seem to have an unexpressed thought. I actually eavesdropped on a 10-minute conversation about bladder-control pants and let me tell you, it was enough to put you off your bacon and eggs, let alone your pineapple juice.
While I'm at it, why do Americans have so mueh trouble with the word "wallaby"? And don't get me started about the drunken buffoon from Washington who kept going on and on about our falling dollar and the money he was saving. It's bad enough that we've got the Pacific Peso, but having a drunken Yank in a Ken Done T-shirt reminding you of the fact was too depressing for words.
Then there's the Rock. Now let me just say at the start it's big, bloody big, much bigger than I ever imagined. You can see the damn thing for miles. That is if you can get between the rock and the bus loads of Japanese that have come to see it. Yes, I bet you were wondering where the Japanese were... they were at the Rock. That's why the Japanese economy is in so much trouble, they're all in Central Australia taking photos instead of at home powering up the wheels of industry.
Once again though, hardly any Aussies, which was a shame because it truly is spectacular. There are moments during sunset when you just drop your jaw in wonder at the thing. It's no surprise that to the indigenous conununity, it is such a sacred place. As a white Australian, you can't help but sense that something magical is happening that you can't quite understand.
Going to Uluru was genuinely moving. That was until I joined a group of German students for a smorgasbord of bush tucker. Why is it that we feel we haven't been to a place until we've eaten it? And as for genuine bush tucker, well in my readings of pre-Captain Cook Australia, I never heard mention of an emu vol-au-vent. But in between the fake bush hats with corks, souvenir stubbie holders and kangaroo scrotum coin purses, there is a very noble beauty to Central Australia and we owe it to ourselves as Australians to see it once.
I just want to say that so you don't think I'm coming across as just another white-bread-and-mashed-potatoes bore who doesn't appreciate multi-cultural food when I say, "Look Japan, enough already with the whale".
Now I've never been known to hug a tree in my life (I've fondled a few shrubs but hey, that's my business) but when that damn public relations company came out a few weeks ago and said "Australia asking Japanese not to eat whale meat was like asking Australian's not to eat meat pies," I saw red.
As I said, I don't care what other cultures shove in their gobs, unless of course the animal that provides the meat happens to be... oh... let's say... on the bloody brink of extinction. And while I'm at it, the whole meat-pie analogy was one of the stupidest arguements I've heard since my mum tried to convince me that if the wind changed my face would stay that way.
I mean, on one hand you have whales - massive, graceful creatures with vast complex brains, whereas pies are small, pastry-encased, mince-filled treats that have no brains at all (not exactly true - I for one will not vouch for exactly what body parts go into the average pie).
Furthermore, no one has ever written a sea shanty about pies, no one called Captain Ahab has gone hunting for the Great White Pie, and at no stage has Hollywood ever made a movie about a young boy and his attempts to free a killer pie from captivity. And, most importantly, meat pies were not hunted to the brink of extinction.
I'm sorry, nothing gets me angrier than a dumb arguement and this is one of the dumbest arguements of all time. Moreover, I love whales, all of them, even the ones with dirty names (come on now, sperm and humpback, what were they thinking).
I also know that some of our vegetarian friends are going to accuse me of hypocrisy, wanting to save cute animals (like whales and seals) while not giving a toss about th ugly ones (cows, sheep and pigs, also ducks, chooks, deer and... well, you get the picture). Well, firstly, hey I like meat - sorry; second, some cows are really cute (although not many can balance a ball on their nose); and thirdly, I might seem like a hypocrite but at least I want to save something.
And to return to my original point, our great blowhole-owning friends are rather more scarce than any of our, shall we say, yummy friends.
One final point in my arguement is a rather personal one: I suppose I also tend to empathise with any large air-breathing mammal that likes to frolic in the ocean. I'm rather fond of that myself.