Fried new potatoes at internet cafe

OPINION: Felis Navidad-ed, writes Sarah McCarthy in this week's Uptown Girl.

So I'm writing my column in semi-holiday mode. That is, I am on holiday and in a very sunny place but can I get my laptop to connect the elbow bone to the knee bone and give me the intermanet? No. Of course not. So I'm actually in what I like to call "Smelly Traveller" mode (although that could be the new organic, all-natural sunscreen I just bought, which smells ever so slightly of, well, fish) and am clacking away on a computer at something called an Internet Cafe. Although there isn't any coffee. But there are about a dozen other people sitting around in their Teva sandals and with sunglasses on their heads similarly tapping away at their Facebooks and My Spaces, I suppose, and telling everyone how AMAAAZIIING Noo Zealand is and how DRUNK they got at Shooter McPigskins last night. Great craic, etc etc etc, love to mammy. That sort of thing.

The sound of all of these people typing away reminds me of work a bit, although the reggae music and lack of swearing tells me it isn't so. And also the knowledge that if I make a massive mistake and my computer starts crying I can't ring up my friendly neighbourhood IT guy and proclaim, for the 60th time, that my PC and I have broken up. I instead have to ask the impossibly cool girl at the desk why there appears to be jam coming out of my hard drive.

So it's Boxing Day when you read this (I believe. I don't know, really, as I am truly, blissfully, out of the loop), and I hope everyone is following the fine tradition of making themselves leftover sandwiches and frying up new potatoes and then crumpling down in front of the telly and whingeing about how all the good stuff is on Christmas Day when everyone is too busy having sulking fits and eating stuffing to watch the box.

Those of you camping or doing other similarly outdoorsy things for Christmas will be swearing yet again that this is the last year you'll do Christmas over a camp stove because it's ridiculous, it really is, and all the kids want is a bloody sausage.

(NOTE: Some person I don't know just sat movie-close to me and is booting up his laptop. Oh God. I just remembered that I make weirdo guitar-player faces when I write. He will think I am afflicted with a palsy.)As for me, on Boxing Day I hope to be less mystified by my Aunt's cryptic instructions for using the stove: "V Fierce. Use scone tray and half the time". Does she mean be angry with the stove and threaten it with a scone tray and then be kind to it and talk in a baby voice and promise to only cook biscuits in it? Odd indeed.

Wish me retrospective luck, and I, in turn, will wish you all a Ghost of Christmas Past-type Merry Christmas, and stuff.

» Sarah McCarthy is a Southland Times staff member.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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