Are we there yet?

The trains aren’t running in Brisbane this week. I guess they decided that so many people would be working from home that they could get their track work done. So I’ve been driving Jane in and out of the city for work and trying to make the best of it.

Last night that meant each of us going to our respective gyms for a workout, and then to one of our favourite wine bars—a place in Woolloongabba called Barrels and Stills—for a little nosh and tipple before heading home. While we were there, we were talking to the guy who runs the place, asking him how it was going.

“Weird,” he said. “It’s going weird.” This place is a bit like a French wine library. It’s a bottle shop, basically, where you can go in, pick a bottle off the shelf, buy it, and then drink it there. It’s very civilised, especially since they also serve nibbles.

But very few people were there. It might’ve been because it was bitching hot and humid as hell and most folks just wanted to be at home in their air conditioning. But they have air conditioning inside, upstairs, and there weren’t many people taking advantage of that either. He said they were getting heaps of phone orders and pick-ups by Uber drivers, but most of his regulars were complaining that they had to work all week and were planning to come in at the last moment for their Christmas grog supplies.

We’d seen something similar all over the city. Monday morning, we were over in Kelvin Grove, where Jane had a swim, and I went for a walk through the old public golf course—soon to be a giant open-air construction site for the Olympic stadium. Our usual café was closed. Most of the cafés were closed. There was only one place open. It seemed pretty much everybody over there had decided the year was done.

I wondered whether it had something to do with the day that Christmas was on. It’s hard to pin down because you’re on a seven-year cycle. It was Wednesday last year. It’s Thursday this year. And I’m not even sure whether leap years interfere with that. But I suspect as Christmas Day gets further down the back end of the week, for most people the week becomes more of a normal work week, and so they leave everything to the last minute.

That’s where I find myself now. I’m trying to catch up on all of the writing time I lost during the roof replacement. And to be honest, this isn’t a bad week to do it because I’ve got at least three full-time working days to get to the keyboard. But then… do I? Do I really?

Increasingly, I’m finding that the Christmas tax is piling up. Chores to do, things to buy, stuff to arrange. We’re having a very low-key Christmas this year. We’re not cooking anything on the day. We’re going to do some turkey the night before and eat it cold with ham on the day, which is expected to be up in the mid-30s and really humid—so, absolutely fucking wretched.

It’s possible we might all retreat to my office to watch our Rob Reiner movie marathon in the air conditioning. But even with that low-key approach, I’m starting to feel like my control of the day is slipping out of my hands. I’m starting to feel as though it might be time to declare an end to the working year. Anybody else there yet?