Yes, this is it, this is New Zealand - open, and dazed, and you have sand in your hair and sand in your pockets, and every day is like Sunday. The sunsets are shocking pink, outrageous, would you look at that. The air in front of you is wrinkled with heat. Mt Ruapehu is as bald as a coot; Lake Tekapo needs a drink. You are walking on hard, pale clay. You are on the porch. There are monarch butterflies, and cicadas, and moths, and flies, mosquitoes, wasps, ants, and visiting brothers.

We are a nation of summer islands - the beach, the dust, the light. It suits us. It makes us. It's the way we imagine ourselves, and brag about it to the world. Postcards of blue Lake Taupo, Art Deco Napier, even Greymouth, and "Wish you were here." Some of our best literature has suntan lotion on its pages - Sargeson's That Summer, Duggan's Along Rideout Road, Janet Frame's The Reservoir, and if you close your eyes while reading Stead's All Visitors Ashore you see orchards and wharves, bare legs and open windows.

It’s our time. A national dress is established: we go outdoors wearing the kind of clothes that make us look like hicks. Summer has a New Zealand brand: L&P softdrink, 'Tip-Top ice-cream, Huttons delicacies. We know what to expect. TV plays rubbish. Some bore gets awarded a knighthood. Cricket. Road tolls. Sex, hopefully. The tent, the garden hose.

Optimists will blandly claim that it's always good to be alive, but summer most definitely has advantages. Food tastes better. You're insane if you think anything beats sliced cucumber and radishes in a bowl of vinegar with lots of salt at the ready. Even vegetarians stop looking so miserable, although it's true that one of the most pitiful sights of the modem age is a vegetarian at a barbecue. Steak. Sausages. Chops. Chooks. Shish kebabs. Burgers. Prawns. Fish. And by all means try barbecued Wattie's fish fingers. Fantastic.

Your gob, your stomach, your entire flesh. Skin smells and tastes delicious in the sun. No doubt many will spend summer on top of jet skis and racing bikes, up and down mountains and in and out of various beds. Good for them. But this is also the best time to perform that most vital bodily function - sleep. It's nice to dose while the morning ripens like a big fat fruit. A nap is a splendid way to ignore the screeching afternoon. As for the evenings – yes, the thing to do is have another good, long snooze, and it doesn’t get better than if a sulking night finally bursts into a thunderstorm, with the wind lunging at your bedroom curtains through the open window, and the rain steaming off the ground by morning.

Summer demands that you hang a sign over your brain: Back in 5 minutes. So you sleep, and you eat, and what's left of your mind is boggled by heat. The cat is as weak as a kitten. You could fry an egg on the pavement. There is so much yellow defeating the earth - gorse, broom, buttercup, lupine, all of the Mackenzie Country. Summer is powerless, exposed. Nothing is as it was. Unplugged and unwanted, schools become ghost towns - the chairs on desks, the dark rooms, the complete silence of the playground as you bend over to drink from an outside basin tap. Sports day, the history exam - their terrors shrivel up and die.

Offices, too, are revealed as nothing more than flimsy walls and the kind of footsore carpets you wouldn’t let your dog vomit on. All work is a sham and summer knows this for a fact, laughs in its face.

The trampoline, the icetray. We are freed from the shocking political event. Old people play cards on folding chairs in their caravans at night. Kids run a lot. There are books to be read, and heaven knows what they call that kind of music these days to be played until dawn at night-clubs. Loneliness will cut like a really big knife. Nothing happens so much that the newspapers are driven to publishing stories about buskers.

All summers are endless, sloppy, childish. But the fact that this is the first summer of the new millennium might sharpen our act - the unknown future luscious with promise. The next century is like Robinson Crusoe's desert island: those first footsteps on the sand are ours, it's up to us to reshape the world as we see fit. In short, this is the time for all sorts of lunatic ideas.

Fair enough. Look at those perfect, virgin numerals on the calendar: the year 2000. Anything could happen. These are exciting times. But the days just get on with it - the willow dangling in the slow creek, the flame-grilled feeling of the fish finger - blue and lovely and shimmering.