Dom 'Furious' George: I read the news today, oh boy

With summer said to be shifting back a month, perhaps the school holidays should be extended over February. Photo / File

After a month off, it's back to the grindstone and as usual I have to catch up with what's happened in the world over the past 4 weeks.

It's customary for me to go a bit reclusive at this time of year; no newspapers, TV news, websites or even radio, with the exception of some cricket commentary.

I still haven't found the inclination to engage in social media so its total absence from my life over the past month or so has effectively maintained the status quo in that regard.

As The Country online producer Hanoi Jane commented earlier this week, I'm effectively "off the grid".

However, performance clauses in a standard employment contract dictate I must find my way back on to said grid and rejoin the rank and file; farewell Mr News Hermit.

I now have to extricate myself from holiday reading, including Philip Norman's excellent 800-page tome on John Lennon and Shaun Assael's The Murder of Sonny Liston, and scour the news media for what the world's been up to.

So what have I missed? Apparently a lot of Trump stuff. He's had his inauguration, axed the TPP and is continuing to preach from the pulpit of nationalism, which I find to be eerily reminiscent of precursors to previous global conflicts.

As Einstein once said, "Nationalism is the measles of mankind."

Speaking of contagious diseases, apparently Auckland Harbour is full of them - a germ-ridden cesspool of poohs and wees spilling forth in a torrent of filth every time it rains.

Maybe I'm not searching hard enough but I haven't seen a great deal of angst and vitriol from the usual suspects who purport to be guardians of the waterways.

Surely human ablutions rate alongside those of cows when it comes to Things We Don't Want In Our Water?

Whatever the case, there has been far too much water down in Dunedin where I write from; so far it has been the summer of discontent where the weather is concerned.

If only we could shift a bit up to our Northland cousins, share the load, if you will.

Thankfully, I had some respite from the wintry conditions via the majestic Central Otago town of Wanaka where we enjoyed a couple of weeks of glorious sunshine.

Our old mate from Weather Watch Phil Duncan says the past five years has seen summer shift back by about a month and reckons sending kids back to school in February makes very little sense as it's the hottest month of the year. It's a valid point - just try convincing parents...

Of course a hot and sunny February and March would be welcome news for cricket fans with Australia and South Africa both scheduled to grace our shores in the coming weeks.

With all due respect to Bangladesh, they're not a team I'd pay to go and see and I barely watched more than a handful of overs while they were here.

Cricket generally takes up a large chunk of my annual summer holiday but with the underwhelming home series and the saturation of various T20 competitions on television, my cricketing experience of late has been largely confined to the backyard where I've racked up plenty of runs against the three-pronged attack of my offspring.

So apart from saturation coverage of a lunatic's assent to the Iron Throne, the filth in our water, crap weather and boring cricket it appears I haven't really missed much at all...

- Dominic George hosts Farming First, 5am-6am weekdays on Radio Sport.