OPINION: The most wonderful time of the year is over. You’re back at work, with no more jingle belling and everyone telling you to be of good cheer. Bah humbug.

Gone are your summer holidays, with endless sun, wafting cooking smells, ill-fitting jandals, tasty ice cream, flowering pōhutukawa, and peaceful twilights stretching ever on.

Fear not. By the time you’ve finished reading this, you’ll realise beaches aren’t all that great, and how fabulous it is to be back at work, with a view of a concrete skyscraper, factory walls, or the public annoying you for goods and services.

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Of course, we all know beaches ARE that great, but when you’re in transition from togs to formal work clothes, you need all the help you can get to stave off your sense of loss. Only a week ago, you were backing in the summer sun with hardly a care in the world.

Beaches, has there ever been such a vastly overrated outdoor experience? Sandy, windy, smelly, sun burny, with towels and stretched out bodies to trip you over, patrolled by screechy seagulls. Did I mention algal blooms?

Beaches are easy on the eye, yes, I will give you that. But we all (should) know that lust is no substitute for a steady reliable partner.

With their sparkling water, beaches are all muscular six packs and bikinis, yet bereft of intellectual substance. You can admire them, and that’s about it. They will burn you in the end.

First up, sand; a most annoying substance, if substance is the right word for something so insubstantial.

Sand gets in. Months after a beach holiday, you are still flushing it out of a body crevice. White, black, crystal or fawn particles -- they’re all equally irritating, mentally and physically.

It’s appropriate that the most annoying insect on earth is called a “sandfly”. Sand is annoying, flies are annoying too.

Even sand doesn’t seem to like being on beaches. If it did, it wouldn’t attach itself to you, then trek back to your tent, bach, motel or crib, and you wouldn’t find it all through every part of your car right through to July.

It is obviously hell-bent on being somewhere else; a school playground perhaps, a kitty litter tray or alongside a green on golf courses, where it can be just as annoying as it is by the seashore.

Why God didn’t use foam rubber to line the edge of seas, oceans, lakes and rivers, beats me.

Look at the advantages. Foam rubber doesn’t rasp your nether regions, it doesn’t heat up to 70 degrees C to make a sandy stroll akin to fire walking over hot coals, and you can lie on it in comfort, you don’t even need a towel.

Enough of sand though, let’s not undermine the other seaside deficiencies. Water, for one. When you are at a beach, you are somehow obligated to immerse yourself in cold water.

If you were in your house with cold water pouring out of the shower and friends urged you to “get in, it’s fine”, you’d be bitter. And looking for new friends.

At the beach, advice like “come on in, the water’s fine” is handed out, and you have no recourse under the libel or fair trading laws, even when the information provided bears no resemblance to reality.

No, instead you must pretend the chill is bracing as the lapping liquid numbs your toes, then your calves, thighs and lastly your most tender parts.

Of all the misguided theories so far encountered (the world is flat, vaccinations make metal objects stick to your magnetised body), the idea that it is fun to leap into nature’s equivalent of an ice bath is right up there.

And water can be a bit fluid in its approach.

At one end of the beach spectrum is the tidal mudflat, in which the water retreats so far you have to wade a kilometre to get to it, and even then it’s more shallow than a water-rationed bath. Too dull, particularly if you have a worried adult screaming that you are “out too far” and waving you back in.

Alternately, there’s the steeply shelving surf beach.

In that case the water rips your feet out from under you, sucks you in over your head, then smashes you with a series of waves so that only the most brief of gulps can be made before you are sent on another visit to the sea floor.

Too exciting, particularly if you don’t have a worried adult screaming for help.

I won’t go into the other failings of beaches, there are too many - wind propelled sun umbrellas, wayward balls smashing into your head, swooping seagulls, ravenous sharks, and sand hoppers. It’s simply not worth it, even if it’s free.

For those who are like-minded, New Zealand's furthest inland point is 8km northeast of Cromwell in Central Otago. It is fully 120km from the nearest marine beach. Go there.

But you won’t see us in Central. We have booked at beautiful Papamoa Beach, where you can smell the salt and listen to the breakers doing what they do best, breaking.

After a year like 2021, we all need a holiday. Badly.