Jim Hopkins: Meagre comfort as we farewell a cruel year

The Pike River coal mine disaster was the final blow in a horrible 2010. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Even Christmas Island isn't safe.

Not that it should be. Christmas is just a name we've given to a speck in the middle of the sea. And names won't calm the waves or make the rocks go soft. Nature doesn't care for names.

Nor does it care for years. We're the ones who slice and dice the shapeless stretch of time and put it into parcels; minutes, hours, days, years. Some of us even give these years we've invented an identity and character beyond their number - the year of the tiger, the year of the rat, the year of the psychic octopus - each of which has its own personality and portents, just like the stars in whose orbit we were born and under whose remit we exist.

And so this is Christmas, an island and a season at the end of a year whose character has in no way been benign. Without wishing to stigmatise any creature, great or small, were 2010 to be the year of anything, we'd probably make it the year of the axe-murdering elephant or the year of the psychopathic rattlesnake or the year of the marauding gang of resurrected raptors who eat Boy Scouts for breakfast.

By any measure it has been a cruel year, redeemed only by that astonishing rescue in Chile. For the briefest time, all around the world, every breathing person ever assailed by fear or teased by hope could share the exhilaration of an escape that beggared belief and strengthened it, too.

But there was only one miracle this year. And it didn't happen here.

Other things did. There was an earthquake. There were floods and droughts and wild winter storms that flayed the farms. There's a vine mess in the kiwifruit orchards, South Canterbury Finance folded and every day, every week, every month, right through the year, this damnable recession dragged on.

The other day, a lady in a shop said, "I've never known so many people feeling the pinch. And they're all our age!" The boomers are going to their dotage with belts so tight the buckle's at the back. Like the man said, "When it all turns to custard, get a spoon".

Public catastrophes, private despairs - that's 2010. Where's the razor, counsellor? This is December, just eight days before Christmas. We should be unwinding, unravelling, starting to feel the warmth of the season in our bones. The news should be frothy and inconsequential, the front page a many-splendoured thing: donations to food banks, lost presents found, families reunited, some message in a bottle discovered on a beach. Instead - and this is just in the last five days - we've had Machete on screen and machetes on the roadside. Pike River has gone into receivership, jobs have been lost, money has gone.

Ever courteous, Trevor Mallard has called Tau Henare "a chocolate-covered banana" without receiving the mildest of rebukes from the Race Relations Conciliator or Human Rights Commission. The Super City has announced a really super rates rise and Pansy Wong's resigned. There'll be a byelection next year and $300,000 will be spent to rectify a $450 error.

No matter, we can borrow it offshore. Heck, we're already borrowing $300 million a week so a little bit more won't hurt. Or maybe it will. Maybe we can't keep on raiding the world's piggy banks. Maybe it's all getting a tad uncomfortable. That's certainly what the Min of Fin, Mr B. English, said on Tuesday when he dropped another nice Christmas present under our tree.

"Oh, wow, Bill! A $15 billion deficit! Just what we've always wanted. Ummmm, couldn't you have just got socks? Or a hanky? A hanky would've been fine, sir. Honestly. We could dry our eyes with a hanky. Or blow our nose, so it matches our chances."

Enough, world! Leave us alone. 'Tis the season to be jolly, remember?

A bit of ho, ho, ho wouldn't go astray. In between the gloom and doom and all rotten, grotty, horrid stuff, at the end of 12 months nigh bereft of cheer, we'd actually like a bit of levity in the run-up to the big nosh in eight days' time. Not just like, but need.

Which may explain why our preoccupation this week hasn't been any of the various desponds that beset us. What's got tongues wagging and folks atwitter is the sheikh of tweak. Or, more precisely, the unlikely fact that the sheikh of tweak and the peak of chic are now an item.

Everyone's chattering. Folk are agog. They speak of little else - not least because there's little else worth speaking of. Mr Warne and Ms Hurley have given us some precious light relief - just when we needed it most. The libido may be a poor substitute for the soul but if it's all we've got - and then by proxy - to lighten the load then we must clasp it to our bosom and relish its comfort.

They do say into each life a little Shane must fall. And this week, thank heavens, he has.