Happily jumping in the blandwagon

As if a nomadic tribe transporting the miracle of fire, we've swaddled our sacred and diminishing ember in protective layers and ushered it from the van's esky to various fridges along our unnecessarily complex route; stealing a peek and maybe a skein of delicious muscle at each stop.

Such is the children's devotion to the tradition of stalled bowel movements over the holiday period, they simply refused to be without their stout-glazed slab of festive pig limb this year, so ensuring its safe passage has been just one of the many challenges to be wrestled with while planning for the insanity of having Christmas far away from home.

If it were up to me (and crucially, it never is), we wouldn't even leave the house for the overrated pursuits of employment, education or emergency health care, so deracinating for an entire week at the end of December seems especially bonkers.

Compared with the limbo of 12 months ago - the anti-Christmas, when we stalked the property like zombies waiting for the coming fire - home was feeling ripe for the lazy surrender of a staycation.

Finally, rain has brought its unrivalled sense of contentment to our formerly ravished acre; the summer lilac (another of our glorified weeds) has attracted more exquisite and impossible-to-believe butterflies than ever before, long-dormant plum, mulberry, cherry and apricot trees are in rude health and producing real, edible fruit; the grass underfoot is soft and yielding as opposed to retracted outposts of spiky under-siege resentment.

Given what other people are going through, it's frightfully bad form to admit in that mournful, final hour before leaving, I walked the boundary wishing the pandemic's bony hand would somehow find us and we'd be locked down until well across the threshold of the new year.

No such bad luck.

MORE B.R. DOHERTY

We're not even camping, we're simply shifting our lives and, it seems, all our possessions to another abode, (once you'd just say "renting a holiday house", now the argot of our social media-savvy times insists on the invocation of "Airbnb") so I'm struggling even more to find justification for this colossal expenditure of time, energy and cash.

I suppose I'll easily find that justification in the promise of a large and good-hearted family reunion in the middle of our expedition, something our extended mob has been planning for months and I'll definitely find it in the generosity of the loving couple who are throwing open their doors to accommodate Grinchy blood-related ingrates such as myself.

And, most importantly, I suppose all the justification I need to so uncomfortably up-stumps can be found pulsating in the seats behind us.

As adults burdened with the booking of accommodation, the smoke-and-mirrors vaudeville of hiding (pre-wrapped) presents in the car, the packing and unpacking and repacking of all those domestic essentials and the driving - so much driving - it's easy to forget the sheer joy and excitement children feel at the prospect of a road trip.

I catch glimpses of those dilating pupils of untinctured trust in the rear-view (except for those of our teenager, who's converted the far-flung rear bench seat into her gloomy bedroom) and realise all this effort is for the kids and, soon enough, placating them with something as basic as a drive up the coast will be near impossible (as our country teen-cum-blonde neo-goth is already teaching us).

Happily enough, once awash with this sort of acceptance, I find myself beginning to enjoy the drive for the drive itself and, in another strange twist of busy family life, it's while side-by-side (and with no escape) in the cockpit of our vehicle, my wife and I suddenly find time to engage in some sustained adult conversation (fully aware of little ears pricked for any juicy bits).

It's fitting while literally under Sydney, bulleting through the surreal barrel of the new NorthConnex tunnel, we realise our second-hand holiday readers share similar titles; my wife is doing Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano and I'm doing Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood.

As the mad, mad world of COVID and Christmas clashes above us, it's in our VW chrysalis (albeit with a touch of Little Miss Sunshine angst and febrility) we talk about both British authors' monumental capacity for alcohol and how, as is so often the case, it was the women in their lives who made it possible for the pickled genius of these men to be embraced across the planet.

I'm someone who would rather drive several hours inland to avoid the increasingly unhinged traffic of the big smoke, so it's somewhat dizzying to look out the window and learn all that good conversation combined with the wormhole properties of that new time tunnel has already shot us well past the danger zone and, before we know it, we've already crossed the Hunter at Hexham and are effortlessly hitting 110km/h up the capacious Pacific Motorway.

The epic campaign of engineering that has transformed this once fraught and tragedy-marred artery into something as flat and lifeless as Perth's new Test pitch is astounding.

In Bird Cloud, her 2011 memoir about building a dream home on a 640-acre parcel of American prairie, Annie Proulx provides a favourite description of a conduit.

The white-blue road twists like an overturned snake showing its belly.

With her signature and deceptively simple brevity, Proulx conveys something so recognisably organic, natural and untameable about that track and it's as we hurtle along the M1, I think how this corridor scrolling beneath our tyres is the diametric opposite of that wild wetlands trail somewhere in Wyoming.

To me, our carriageway of cambered perfection looks and feels and even smells like thick slabs of marzipan troweled up and down the eastern seaboard. These stale rails have been left to bake and harden under the sun and now provide 21st century parents with the kind of peace of mind their pioneering counterparts could have only dreamed of during this most peripatetic time of year.

Still, for all its safety, the freeway has replaced this once-eventful journey with a certain blandness and I'm yearning for a little cutting-edge adventure the other side of the exit lane.

No doubt we'll find it at the Big Banana.