Garth George: Winter just here, and I'm sick of it already

Photo / Thinkstock

All good things, they say, must come to an end, and the latest to do so is summer.

The onslaught of winter in the past week or so has brought to an end one of the longest (it started early in November) and warmest summers in Rotorua for yonks.

Sadly it will soon be a memory, for this morning (Tuesday) when I went for my walk round the neighbourhood, I was burdened with thermal underwear, a tracksuit, a heavy padded jacket, woolly hat pulled down over my ears and thick ski gloves.

The jacket, incidentally, is at least 10 years old, faded and with a faulty zip, but it's still the best winter jacket I've ever owned. I paid a good deal for this warm London Fog garment at Smith and Caughey's, and it has provided ample proof that if you want quality you must pay for it.

For all the talk that winter has arrived much later than it did last year, I am already feeling the onset of my usual winter mindset - bleak and grey like the temperature and the skies and the bare trees outside our gas-heated lounge.

I am not a winter person, and look askance at those who proclaim that they are.

I hate winter. I loathe the cold; I detest the wind and the rain. I have to force myself to get up every morning, abhor having to take my constitutional before the sun is properly up and resent having to pull the curtains late in the afternoon to keep the heat in.

The big gas space heater in the lounge is already going morning and night. If there is any consolation in thoughts of the months to come, it's that gas is much cheaper than electricity or even firewood.

Which reminds me of a German proverb I came across once, which says: "Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat."

I suppose I could take consolation, too, in the fact that I don't have to live in Invercargill where I was brought up, and where winter lasts for at least seven months every year and summer comes on a Friday in February.

Compared with our southernmost city, where the snow-laden southerly barrels up from the Antarctic bringing horizontal rain and sleet, and a cold that cuts right to the bone, winters in this part of the world are relatively mild. I suppose I could count that as a blessing, but I'm not in the mood.

I wrote a few years ago that I was hoping that after a few winters in Rotorua - which is a damn sight colder than Auckland both because it's several degrees further south and far from the moderating effect of an ocean - that I would acclimatise, but that hasn't happened.

I guess I forgot to factor in my increasing age, which in my eighth decade seems to have made me more sensitive both to heat and to cold. The onset of winter seems to provide a slightly bigger shock to the system as every year goes by.

I simply can't conceive of how elderly folk who can't afford adequate heating manage to survive. But, then, a fair few don't. The death-notice index always seems longer in winter, particularly after really cold snaps.

As Mark Twain put it: "[Winter] is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death."

Yet I can thank God that I don't have to go to work daily, that I can choose to leave the house or not.

Most of the time I really can't be bothered doing anything except to lounge in my easy chair and read newspapers and books. I am disinclined to go out in the cold and the wet, particularly at night when I have to navigate among dickheads whose vehicles show only one headlight and sometimes none at all.

Rather do I let my mind drift to that winterless wonderland that is Central and North Queensland, where I lived for a season or three in Rockhampton and Townsville.

There you have to wear a sweater, and perhaps long trousers, in the evenings for a week or four in June and July; for the rest of the year a T-shirt and shorts is ample.

And I will remember, too, the summers we used to have in Auckland back in the 1970s and early 80s - week after week of cloudless days and balmy temperatures with the odd, brief rainstorm thrown in, when you rarely needed to wear a jacket until about this time of the year.

And I will resolutely ignore the words of the American author Willis Cather, who once wrote: "Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen."