Garth George: Winter of discontent starting ever earlier

It's started early this year. I am not a winter person and already my mindset has taken on the same leaden colour as the sky.

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.

Usually it takes until July or August for me to descend into this pit of winter despair, but this year it seems to me there was no autumn, and winter arrived straight after summer - or what passed for summer.

Climate change? For sure. Global warming? Maybe, but if so, it's happening somewhere else.

The big gas-fired space heater in the lounge has been going nightly and sometimes daily since the middle of April so Genesis Energy is making a fortune at my expense.

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."

You'd think that a boy from Southland - where winter is seven months long and summer happens on a Friday in January - would be inured to such desolate weather, but after 30-odd years in Auckland and four in Australia, my South Island winter genes seem to have gone to sleep.

I was hoping that after my first winter in Rotorua they would revive, but there's no sign of it so far. For it is a shock to the system to experience winter here, in the middle of the island, several degrees south of the Big Smoke and thus several degrees cooler.

"Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen," wrote Willa Cather, an American author. That's surely the case in this country town, but she could have added that it starts far too early as well.

Nevertheless it could be worse. We are lucky here that the nastiest weather - gale-force winds, snowstorms and such - seems to pass us by, as it did this week when we had a hailstorm lasting only a few minutes while Mt Maunganui and Papamoa were buried under a blizzard.

So as far as I'm concerned it should be summer all the year round and it is about this time every year I yearn to be back in Central Queensland where my wife and I lived for a couple of years and which has just that sort of climate.

Winter there lasts for a few weeks in June-July during which you need to put on a jacket or sweater and long pants, but only for an hour or so first thing in the morning and after 5pm. For the rest of the year a T-shirt and shorts is ample. That's paradise.

Trouble is, it isn't home. In spite of its closeness and similarities, Australia is still a foreign land.

There was one other winter I will never forget, although it was more than 50 years ago. That was in Minnesota where I experienced my only white Christmas. There were feet of snow on the ground, temperatures were well below zero, but it was calm and dry, with crystal clear skies for most of the time.

Indeed, after 17 years of winters in Invercargill, it was a pleasure to experience.

These days, however, as I live my 69th year, I identify with Mark Twain, who wrote: "[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 the Lord 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 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.

But enough of this. Let's look on the bright side. There is a Japanese proverb which we all might well take particular note of which says: "One kind word can warm three winter months."

And the words that might bring hope to the faces of even the coldest of us come from American businessman, author and motivator Bo Bennet, who said: "As sure as the spring will follow the winter, prosperity and economic growth will follow recession."

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