As a kid our long summer holidays were mostly spent at the Croydon pool, with plastic containers of white-bread sandwiches, wedges of watermelon, and afternoon icy-poles from the canteen. The concrete was already hot by the time we arrived in the middle of the day, and Mum would lay out striped towels with white fringing for us to dump our stuff on. Then we were straight into the water where we would stay until we grew hungry.
We always holidayed at home in January, enjoying the stretch of dreamy days. My parents preferred to go away in September, driving up north where it was warm, chasing the sun like reptiles. But for those long days after Christmas and before school started, there were the visits to the pool. Sometimes we’d go to the movies or the drive-in, visit the library in town, make biscuits or freeze homemade cordial icy poles. Friends might come over and we’d attach the hose to the trampoline in the back yard and bounce for hours on the slippery material, careful to avoid a leg disappearing down into the springs.
Except for the trampoline, my summer holidays haven’t actually changed much from that time. I work freelance, so I don’t have paid entitlements, and January is usually the leanest month of my year, which means that even if I do have weeks off, I don’t have the money to do very much at all. It’s always hard booking holidays as a freelancer, due to the worry that work will come in the moment I pay for a holiday house or an air fare somewhere, and I’ll spend the entire trip feeling guilty that I should have accepted the job. It means that holidays are often enforced rather than chosen, taken in snatches when there is simply no work.
Some years we go camping in January with other families, which is an inexpensive way to swim in the sea and wake up surrounded by trees and brawling koalas. But some years, I leave it too late to organise anything and find myself in mid-December without a single plan. I used to be panicked by this but now I have learned to enjoy my city in the weeks where most of its occupants leave. The streets are empty, making it easy to cross from north to south, businesses shut down, and there is an entire lane at the swimming pool just for me.
When my kids were little, holidaying at home was often easier than navigating nap times and car trips. And so I would spend hours playing endless games of hide and seek and making potions in the back yard, using up every spice in the house. As the kids grew, they were happy to spend days by the pool, arriving late afternoon and eating a picnic dinner of boiled eggs and raw carrots before trundling home to bed. Now, as teenagers, they enjoy spending their long summer break at home, lying in bed watching television or hanging out with friends for endless sleepovers that move from one house to the next.
Without the structure of school or work, January is a month of lost time. Days fill with the reading of a book, bingeing a new TV series, or perhaps the cleaning of those cupboards I never usually get around to. While friends retreat to holiday homes and spend weeks at the beach, posting photos that sometimes make me jealous, we stay up late, sleep in, eat mangos off the pip, and catch up with friends who are also in town.
After the lockdowns of the pandemic, we were all desperate to leave, to flee our houses, our towns, our countries. But that feeling has settled a little now for me and I’m enjoying the thought of pottering again. I can start work on a project that may never make money, catch up with a friend who I never have time to see, and pickle vegetables to eat when I’m busy again. But my favourite thing to do if I’m holidaying at home is to buy a jigsaw puzzle of a farm or a field or a far-off land from a local op shop where I trust the workers who write on the outside of the 1000-piece box that all pieces are accounted for. At home, I’ll clear the dining table, accept that our meals will be eaten on laps on the couch for the next few weeks, and upend the box of pieces, making a start on the edge. There I’ll sit for hours, refilling my cup of tea, the cat circling my feet, as I work my way through the scene and forget time.
• Nova Weetman is an award-winning children’s author. Her adult memoir, Love, Death and Other Scenes, is out in April 2024 from UQP
