Lurching to a halt at the end of the year

For some reason Christmas reminds me of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘Huis Clos’, named after the French equivalent of an in camera trial or closed courtroom. It’s about three people who have died, locked together awaiting judgement in a crowded room for eternity. It’s the origin of Sartre’s famous line ‘hell is other people’.

The world suddenly lurches to a halt
But it’s not the idea of hell that Christmas reminds me of (though possibly I could say that about a few distant Christmases in my past – it’s true that Christmas can be one of the most stressful times of the year). It’s the fact that at Christmas, especially on Boxing Day, the world suddenly lurches to a halt and stops still at the doorway of the approaching year. 

Let's make the world great again.

A different universe lapped by waves

The little city that serves Australia as a capital is far from any coastline, even though in a strange historical quirk it actually has a coastline at Jervis Bay. Yet to reach the South Coast of New South Wales, below the swollen city where Australia’s official European history began, takes hardly any time at all. It’s much more drawn out heading down the coast from Sydney, through the great Sydney sprawl past Wollongong and beyond.

My favourite coffee cart on the beachfront at Malua Bay.

A different universe
The South Coast is an entirely different universe to the capital, tucked up as it is in the mountains and removed from the insulated world of well-paid industry lobbyists and variable quality politicians. It would also be removed from the rest of the population who live and work in Canberra except that an inordinately high proportion of them have holiday homes at the coast or retire there. Those who don’t do either, visit anyway.