My wife and I have never been on an ocean cruise. I know that some people swear by the ten-day sail around the Mediterranean. Or the longer voyage through the South Pacific. The possibilities are endless. We’ve just never tried it. There are two main reasons. Firstly, we see ourselves as too young. (I emphasise here the self-image component of that claim, not any sort of disinterested assessment by an outsider.) And secondly, we would not be big fans of the super-big ocean cruise ships. In all but one scenario, I would not be able to get my wife onto any ship holding over three hundred or so people. That said, for our virgin cruise we have started mooting three possibilities. One is up the west coast from Vancouver to Alaska. The second is to go to the Antarctic, with a stop at the Falkland Islands before the current woeful British Prime Minister tries to give another colony away. And the last, the exception to the ‘no big ships’ rule, would be taking the Queen Mary II from New York to London or vice versa.

In fact, that’s what we were considering for this Christmas. ‘Maybe we should break the habit of a lifetime and take a cruise?’ Well, habits are hard to break and we didn’t.  The Alaska cruise isn’t operating at Christmas. We gambled that ‘Two-tier Keir’ might hold off giving back the Falklands for a bit yet. And as tempting as an Atlantic crossing was, we resisted. Instead, as you’ll see, we’ve opted for something pretty unusual.

Let me explain. For the last six or seven years the Allan Christmases have involved going to Toronto and London – and with our two kids working in London and stuck in small apartments my wife and I did even go both Covid Christmas years. Yes, if you were to believe the lockdown thugs (and that, of course, includes Messrs Morrison and Hunt and nearly all of those on the then Coalition government benches), then we were as brave as Spitfire pilots in the second world war. Sure, they had a life expectancy of two weeks and ours was basically exactly the same as it had been before Covid. But hey, in the fear-mongering and panic-inducing game, ably aided by the entirety of the legacy media, you can’t deal in nuance. ‘We’re all in this together’ remember – even if the authoritarian thugs who imposed this on us didn’t pay any costs at all. Not a penny less in salary. Not the slightest chance of losing their jobs. Often even wholly exempted from being incarcerated in tiny apartments and when not, then generally able to enjoy a big house with grand lawns and gardens.

Sorry. Where was I? I do find myself still hankering after some sort of Old Testament retribution against the public health caste and the politicos who did that to us. And maybe with the wonderful Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya getting the Trump nomination to head up the National Institute of Health and with RFK Jr. getting Trump’s nod for Health, we might actually see some people having to bear the consequences of their Covid fear-mongering thuggery. But back to Allan family Christmases. In addition to Toronto (to visit elderly moms and siblings) and London (to rent big AirBnB places in the countryside with our kids and their main squeezes) we wanted to add in something else. Something non-cruising.  So here’s what my wife and I will be doing mid-January. We’re off to the furthest north ‘Northern Lights’ lodge in the world. We’ll be over 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. On 16 January we’ll be flying from London to Tromso, Norway. A night there and then it’s another few hours’ drive to this eight-room lodge. Next year is supposed to be one of the best ‘Northern Lights’ years in a while. Where we’ll be the light show will be right above our heads, assuming we don’t get unlucky with continual clouds. And the tapering-off Gulf Stream current means at 70 degrees latitude the temperatures still don’t fall below minus-15, something we get regularly in Toronto.

‘Just how far north is this?’ you ask. Well, the day before we arrive at the lodge there will be no sun at all the whole day. In fact, this ‘no sunlight at all Polar Night’ will have started in late November. Sure, there’s a bit of what the Tromso tourist authority calls ‘subtle twilight’. But actual sunlight for the year begins the day we get to this lodge and does not last long.

What does one do at the farthest north sky-viewing lodge in the world? Well, one day we’ll be out on a five-hour dog-sledding expedition. On another it’ll be snowmobiling. We’re old enough to have picked a place with good food and wine. The lodge has experts on the northern lights – and let’s hope they’re a good deal better than the public health experts who just made up social distancing rules, ignored the massive costs of closing schools, of blowing out spending and willy-nilly closing small businesses all while pretending masking made any real difference and better than the ‘you gotta vote Yes to the Voice’ legal experts who didn’t know their rear ends from the front door of the High Court. So we’ll hear about the Northern Lights and see what we hope will be some pretty magnetic (get it?) viewing.

Then we fly down to Oslo for a couple of days. (I’ve taken out a mortgage on our house to pay for the beers.) After which we’ll take one of the world’s best train rides across Norway over to Bergen for a couple of days.  I did that back in the northern summer of 1982. I was spending my university summer holiday travelling around Europe with my best buddy, an American from Richmond, Virginia. We drank at night and went to museums by day, continually for about seven weeks. But somehow at one point we found ourselves in Oslo and took this famous train. It was late July, the heart of summer there.  And it wasn’t long before we saw snow outside the train. I’m pretty sure – sorry to disappoint the climate change hysterics here – that we’re going to see a heck of a lot more snow in late January. And my vague memories of Bergen are that it was fantastically beautiful.

Anyway, that’s the unusual bit of my Christmas holiday coming up. Think of my wife and me in mid-January, in the pitch-black from morning to night. Actually, what with this country’s insane electricity policies, things might not be that much different in Sydney in January. Still, happy Christmas to you all. It is a great pleasure to be a writer for this wonderful magazine.