KEY POINTS:
I am lonely. Terribly lonely. Beset by the sort of bereftness that usually comes only in the wake of a break-up or a move or a very bad fight.
I've experienced none of those things, though. I haven't gone anywhere, or dumped anyone, or been dumped, and my usual, inevitable Christmas Day spats are well smoothed over by now.
And yet I am walking around feeling lost and strange and I wake up in the night with a jittery panicked feeling in my chest. What's happened to me?
Summer holidays, that's what.
Not that I go on holidays. I hate them. Always have. Growing up, my mother insisted on a holiday, every year, without fail. Last week of July, first week of August and like clockwork we'd be crammed into the station wagon and driven off to the beach for two weeks.
There we would be installed in a caravan, where we would then proceed to spend 14 long days and 14 interminable nights crammed together, regardless of our chronic attention deficit disorders and natural hatred for each other.
This in southwest Ireland in July, when the average weather conditions are a daily approximation of the Great Deluge. The local amenities would vary, depending on what benighted hamlet she had chosen for our relaxing retreat, but as a rule they consisted of a chip shop, a pool hall and a local hostelry with nightly entertainment, usually a "trad" band with a line-up of local alcoholics and perverts.
You could get lucky, of course; one year the pub had two slot machines out the back, as well as the usual line-up of drunks and topless postcards behind the bar. It was unprecedented, delirium-inducing. My younger brother got a nosebleed from the excitement of it all.
That was a great two weeks, feeding the pokies morning, noon and night, but alas it was the exception rather than the rule. My father quickly developed an aversion to that particular pastime and in any case, we rarely went to the same destination more than twice in a row.
Every couple of years Mammy would get it into her head that we needed a change of scenery and would set her mind to finding a fabulous new spot on which we could descend.
Being a highly sentimental, not to mention superstitious sort of woman, her choice was usually guided not so much by actual information on a place as by her notions about it, notions informed by such disparate occasions as dreams, visions, feelings in her water and whether a bird flew into the house that particular morning.
Thus we would, more often than not, end up on some deadly stretch of Atlantic coastline, trapped in a horrible little village with an unpronounceable Gaelic name where we could look forward to two weeks of dodging the old, the infirm and the mentally disturbed in a climate of driving rain and icy cold.
Respite came only at the age of 15, when I was finally allowed to skip it.
There aren't words for the joy I felt on being allowed to stay at home. Not only was I missing out on an annual hell-on-Earth, I also had more time to devote to my newly cultivated pastimes of drinking cans of cider and kissing boys.
That was my last experience of summer holidays, and understandably enough, I haven't wanted to engage in the practice since.
Everyone here in Auckland seems to want to, though, and that is the problem. Overnight I have been deserted. Left as high and dry as Rapunzel in her tower, if I am Rapunzel and my tower is an inner-city apartment on the 11th floor.
All of my loved ones, my fellow blackguards, my coadjutors, my friends, have fled. If they haven't decamped to the Coromandel, they're getting it on in Gisborne, raving in Wellington, messing about the lake in Taupo or sunbathing starkers on Waiheke.
Even the ones who haven't taken off are holed up at home, getting drunk in the garden and taking "candid" pictures of their children to put up on Facebook.
The city is deserted and everyone is off having fun somewhere else. That's how it feels anyway.
It was nice at first, to have the boulevards all to myself, to cross the road where and when I wanted to, without fear of being mashed flat by the traffic, and lovely too, to have otherwise empty Link buses at my beck and call.
There is something ennobling about loneliness, too, a virtuous sense of self-satisfaction that comes from feeling like you're the only person in the whole place left answering the phone while the rest of the country goes off for a hooley on the beach.
It's nice to feel useful at least. And I know I have no business feeling lonely when I'm getting to talk to thousands of people on the radio every day. I do, though. I miss you all and I still hate summer holidays. Only this year it's yours I hate, not mine.
