KEY POINTS:
"If winter comes," the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley tried to console us, "can spring be far behind?" Well, yes, actually, when you're stuck at the bottom of the earth on a tiny huddle of islands in the planet's largest ocean.
The poet's words come in Ode to the West Wind, which is about a different westerly from the one that prevails over New Zealand: his one sucked up the cold from Greenland and Iceland and hurled it at England's green and pleasant land; ours is a flow which normally ambles nonchalantly across the Tasman, picking up a bit of moisture that, as they say, will be good for the garden.
If good old Percy Bysshe had been down this way this weekend, it's more likely he would have called his little poem Ode to the Southerly or, better still, Bugger the Southerly. That's the wind that springs to mind when you read about its "congregated might / Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere / Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst".
Like it or not, winter has arrived with a vengeance and, right now, spring seems a very long way away indeed. It's colder than charity, but we all know there is worse to come.
Thursday was the shortest day but it's far from being the coldest. That's because ours is an maritime climate. The upside is that we don't suffer the extremes experienced by continental land masses at northern hemisphere latitudes similar to ours; the downside is that our land temperature is dictated by the changing temperature of the oceans around us which take a while to change direction. From here on out, the days are getting longer but the nights are getting colder.
Nothing for it but to draw the curtains, rug up warm and hope like hell that the power stays on.
