Anyone with half a brain will tell you the Ida Valley is idyllic.
''Are you going away this Christmas?'' the half-brained will ask solicitously.
''Yes, to the Ida Valley,'' I will reply.
''Oh you are so lucky,'' they will say.
''I hear it's IDYLLIC!''
Idyllic is in the eyes of the beholder.
Barring severe food poisoning from Christmas Day, followed by a life-threatening auto-immune disease and protracted hospitalisation, I should be in the Ida Valley as you read this, idyllicking myself silly.
Except, and this is the thing, my idyllicking days are over.
Look no further than the searing sun.
This pours down like honey in the Ida Valley.
For decades I have drunken in searing sun like there is no tomorrow.
Our family were nudists, faithful attendees at the Otago Sun and Health Club, and my little white-skinned body became burnt and blistered as I frolicked and romped at the foot of Maungatua out on the Taieri.
Yes we played deck quoits. All nudists play deck quoits.
Skin cancer damage is often done young, and as a kidney transplantee, 20% more likely to acquire melanomas, I now find myself double-whammied.
Three times this year the scalpellists at Dunedin Hospital have removed chunks from my arm and leg.
When I asked if I could still lie in a deck chair at the Ida Valley - with 30+ Cancer Society sun screen of course - they asked me if I was insane.
So in the Ida Valley right now, I will be lying in a deck chair, but I will be completely covered in clothing, balaclava, gloves and scarf.
It will be 40 degrees and I will look and feel like a complete drong.
But there is more than just searing sun in the Ida Valley.
Like all idyllic spots, it has rolling paddocks and nearby rivers, except the magpies will dive on me in the paddocks and eat out my eyes, and I will either drown or be eaten alive in the mighty Manuherikia.
I will drown because I can't swim, and the conger eels, with fangs the size of titanium toothpicks, will ensure the river hands out a horrible and loud death.
''There are no conger eels in the Manuherikia,'' says my friend up there, Brian Turner.
But what would he know? He's a poet.
Our old mud-brick hotel in the Ida Valley has an inside toilet, though sometimes there are problems with the cistern and the plumbing, so we have to go outside and squat in the bushes, naked from the waist down, very exciting for the giant feral cats, who of course, we cannot see until it is too late.
We also have an inside bathroom, but the shower operates at one drip per second, and spiders the size of tennis balls appear out of the plug hole in the basin when we are cleaning our teeth.
Did I mention the water is brown?
So the bathroom isn't idyllic either.
Summer means playing cricket on the big front lawn.
Fun.
Mind you, we have to mow the huge lawn first, and that will take an hour or two, especially when the second-hand motor mower breaks down and we run out of two-stroke petrol, and bolts from the old railway tracks across the road wreck the mower's blades and whirr around, which makes the head hurt because the headphones don't work.
There is no TV or phone and cellphone reception is sketchy, but one doesn't go to the Ida Valley for technology.
I don't mind missing out on really important information that could affect my life dramatically just because we are living like the Moriori.
And at the end of the day you can lie down with relief in a bed, such relief, though it rolls into the middle and is ridden with tiny insects from parts unknown who bite the bejesus out of your legs and feet all night.
The rustling in the roof and walls is only possums and large rats, never ferrets.
Oh wait, one time it WAS a ferret.
Under the bed all night, rustling and scratching and sniffing.
Idyllic.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
