Jim Hopkins: This year, the holiday dream time is a bad dream time

There is water outside the window; a whole harbour full, peacefully reflecting the drifting clouds in an overcast sky. It's calm today. No wind. And no waves breaking the still, calm pastel-green sea, just the slowly spreading ripples of a wake as the launch goes on its way.

Out in the harbour, a drowsy yacht sits becalmed, the white triangle of its unruffled sails clear against the hills that once, long ago, were part of a belching volcano.
This is how it is today, and how it is every year. For a little while - not long, only a few days - the port shuts down, the clatter fades, the straddle cranes park up and the wharves wait.

A great stillness falls upon things. But it won't last long. This is the eye of the annual storm, the uncanny pause that comes after the fury and before it starts again.

Your bones go soft at this time of year. The nervous energy discharges and the phone stops ringing. No one wants anything, except to be left alone.

Even the news has a break. All the well-paid people who are supposed to be indispensable are dispensed with. The famous faces who bear our tidings fade to black.

And we don't care. We don't mind that there's no news. Or just a little. A lost dog here, a found cat there, a flooded campsite everywhere. That is the news of summer.

And it's wonderful. It's a holiday from reality - or what we're told is real. The lies and leaks and laws and crimes and conflicts; all the bile and sadness that fuels the angry snarl of a world too full of news for its own good.

It's a glorious vacuum, these short few days. The ad breaks shrink, the strident music of the current affairs shows stops and strange programmes creep on to radio and television. Comedy sneaks in, subversively replacing all those serious interviews about things that matter.

Instead of people gnawing on the bones of our discontent, we hear Spike Milligan playing weird music and three hours of Garrison Keillor's gentle, quirky, funny Lake Woebegone Radio Show on Boxing Day - or was it the day after? No matter. Any day they play him is a good day.

We savour these moments because we know they will not last. And they don't. But at least we can dream this lovely dream for a few days every year.

Except this year. This year, the world did a terrible thing. Not large, by its measure - just the casual shrug of a tectonic shoulder. But that was enough. Enough to release the energy of a million atom bombs, enough to make the planet shake as it spun in space; enough to send a 10m wave across the oceans and into the land.

If that wave had come into this harbour it would have swept the straddle cranes into the sea and smashed the 30 big oil tanks full of fuel to take the cars on holiday.

It would have struck the sleeping houses at the base of the old volcanic cliffs and spread their memories over the hills. It would have wrecked the yachts and the fishing boats and the dinghies and the sheds and then it would have gone, as quickly as it came. But it didn't come here. It went there.

A force powerful enough to move islands and end an unknown number of lives, probably more than 100,000, in towns and resorts, on buses and boats, asleep and awake, at work or at play.

We watch the pictures aghast, thinking about the people from here who are there but not yet accounted for and we hope things are well with them. And with all of those whom chance has spared.

And we ring the Red Cross 0900 line, because we're human, and then we ring again, because we know that once is not enough.

Not when something like this happens right at the time when nothing's meant to happen and the sun's supposed to be shining and the day is filled with the half-heard comfort of a cricket commentary from Pukekura Park or Alexandra in the south.

This year, the dream time is a bad dream time, dominated by an event too big and too awful to imagine. In an earlier age, it might have been the source of legend and fable. Survivors might have taken tales of Mu or a mighty Ark with them to other parts of the world.

But this is the age of 24-hour news channels and no island is an island anymore. So we get live coverage of death and, be assured, the editors will want the worst images they can get.

They did when Erebus happened. When the phones started ringing in the newsroom at Avalon, the question they asked was: "Are there pictures of bodies?" And when we told them there weren't, they hung up.

No need to do so this time. This time, the world has reminded us it is a fierce and indifferent place. We need it but it doesn't need us. It would find something else to occupy it if we weren't here. No puny law or protocol or warning on the packet will ever stop it doing what it does.

It may be beneath our feet but we and all our conceits are under its control.