A grey old morning. (Just off) the corner of Macquarie and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart. December 2010. Christmas comes but once a year…? Thank Christ for that. There are a few things about Christmas that I don’t mind: giving presents, a few days off, some quality time in the kitchen, a cauldron of chocolate mousse. Regrettably, these are vastly outweighed by the things I loathe: tinsel , phony goodwill, the remorseless desire for material goods, the prevalence of fat guys in red suits with Rangifer tarandus sprinkled with snow despite the unmistakable fact that we here at the arse end of the world are in the middle of summer and you have as much likelihood of spotting a Thylacinus cynocephalus making love with a Raphus cucullatus to the tune of Mental as Anything’s Berserk Warriors than that hackneyed old scene. It’s about time that us here in the Antipodes start seizing the initiative and make up our own bunch of nonsense set of traditions to ram down the throats of everyone until...