Wrap up in summer's legacy this winter

A bloke at a conference last year - not an academic or an expert, just a man who collects overdue debts as courteously as he can - said something so astute about the way we've organised our modern lives that it warrants repetition.

"These days," he said, "we pay for our money with our time and our time with our money."

He's right. That's precisely what we do. Unless we're fortunate enough to be a sickness beneficiary so vehement of temper that we must be "remotely monitored" - ie, left alone.

In which case, other people pay for our money with their money and we spend our time any way we please, safe in the knowledge the pool has been securely fenced.

Privileged exceptions aside, most of us do inhabit the world described by our man at the conference.

We do spend most of the year working, building pool fences or raising ACC levies or something equally essential.

Then, at the end of the twelvemonth, having paid for our money with our time, we dash off with our dosh for a richly deserved break at the Burgh Dunsandel or, if we're really lucky, the even more exotic spas of balmy Dargaville.

(A very happy New Year to you all, cheery Dargies. Quids in you're having more fun up there than some of us here in the broken south, but that's another story.)

Though it's not a January story. Heavens, no. There's no story in January. That's why we invented it. This is our time's time. It's when we put our money to work and have fun. Followed by more fun. Then a fun chaser.

Bronzed, burnished, bewitched and bedazzled, in marbled foyers or canvas tents, in cool green glades or on a broiling beach, with others or lovers or just by ourselves, reading, roaming or re-gifting our Christmas presents, blogging or snogging or prodding some burnt bit of beast on a sputtering barbie, with our winter-white toes snuggled in the sand and our anxious pores sweating away a whole year's angst and stress, we put the world aside and hoe in to a well-earned lotus buffet.

The days are Tui, the nights are Stella. There's sand in the ice creams and ice creams in the sand.

The sun's out, it's hot and we don't care. We're quite content to be warm for a change. Nobody's running round with a Copenhaggard look on their face, insisting this proves we're about to get our just deserts.

There'll be plenty of time for that sort of malarkey later in the year when we're back, paying for our money with our time.

Break out the sack cloth and ashes, by all means, in February and March, July or September. By then, we may be disgruntled enough to take notice. But not now. We're not interested now. It doesn't matter.

The papers are thin, the 6 o'clock news on telly finished two hours ago and we missed it and, quite frankly, we couldn't give a toss.

Even radio, summer's perfect companion, has forsaken its customary diet of Cassandras and provided instead, oh blessed relief, that most wonderful of programmes, an American Goon show if ever there was one: Garrison Keillor's sublime Prairie Home Companion, currently playing on National Radio New Zealand Local (or whatever it calls itself these days) though only on Saturdays and Sundays, alas, and not for much longer at that.

Whether by crystal set or some newfangled podcaster thingamajig, you should lend Garrison your ear. Anyone who can successfully weave T. S. Eliot's The Love song of J. Alfred Pufrock into Chuck Berry's Memphis during a show from St Louis, Missouri (the birthplace of both) deserves the undivided attention of the nation's lugholes.

At least until the standard ponderous parade of "experts" returns to tell us why they know best.

Oh, pay them no heed, people. An expert's just somebody who hasn't been proved wrong yet. Whatever they tell us will be contradicted in 12 months' time.

There's no need to worry about them or indeed about most things, when you get down to it. Truth to tell, only 10 per cent of the news actually matters. The rest is froth and frenzy, the foaming of fads and the fuelling of false fears. So let it pass.

Let that be summer's legacy. Keep your lazy, hazy, what-the-heck flame flickering throughout the working months of winter.

Bad enough that we must soon reluctantly re-gird our sun-tanned loins and engage again with the trials and tribulations of the year ahead. But remember, everything we do is either a choice or a compunction.

And since we can, if we're willing, choose to change most of our compunctions then, basically, everything we do is a choice.

And while we're out there with teeth clenched, sleeves rolled up, paying for our money with our time, we can choose to say "that's enough, thank you very much".

The world gets that pound of flesh, but no more.

And when things become strident and the sirens wail, when the news bespeaks horrors unimaginable and calamities dire, we can calmly and merrily choose to head straight back to the beach and let it all wash over us.