Just my luck: I'm asked to pen the first editorial of the year and you lot are hungover.
Damn hard to find an attentive audience this time of year.
Mind you, I'm undecided whether that gives me scope to wax lyrical or keep the writing as tight as Sam Hunt's jeans.
Either way, I wanted to touch on the silly season's top cliche: "Didn't last year fly by?"
Not only is the planet heating up, it seems most of us think time itself is getting faster.
I'll call it global quickening. (It has huge potential as 2011's cause celebre).
Yet while society's spending precious time lamenting time's hurry, I contest that it's not the fastest thing on the planet. It's the slowest, in fact.
I once heard comedian Billy Connolly bemoaning people bemoaning time's haste: "How can this be possible? Can anyone here think of anything that moves slower than time?"
No one could. Because of course nothing does.
Speaking of puzzling holiday phenomena, like men who shave on holiday, it seems this year's top resolution revolves around containing financial loss.
Many of the Bay's 2010 headlines, much of which I had the dubious privilege of writing, involved real loss. Hence it remains paradoxical that we're still fretting about global quickening (and by implication our own mortality) - yet fiscal prudence trumps all other resolutions for 2011.
My resolution is quite the opposite: try not to worry about the folding stuff. In fact against all financial planning advice, I advise against planning your future - those of us spending time planning our futures risk turning our future into our past.
In two weeks, I'm camping in a dusty shearers' quarters with the family at Aramoana Beach. My sons will join me in the briny collecting paua, my girls will giggle as I read to them in their sleeping bags, and I'll spend the evenings drinking wine with my wife.
That should stem the quickening.
Here's wishing you all an endless summer.
Editorial: Now is the time to live the real life
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