The more observant (annoyingly retentive) of you may remember that I wrote a post a few weeks ago scoffing at, even mocking the Australian ‘winter’. I derided both the Aussie version of the bleak season and Aussies themselves for being fragile and delicate when the temperatures dropped below 15°C.

Well, I want to humbly retract that post. As I shivered my way to the bus stop this morning, grass crunching under my feet, I realized that Australia has a proper winter. For the last few weeks it has either been raining – and I mean raining, not drizzling, showering or sprinkling – or bright and cold. There’s no snow or bitter cold, but it’s tangibly winter. Short days, jackets, umbrellas, winter. It’s not that the winter here is terrible. No, I don’t get to the beach as I would like to, but it’s bearable. The problem is that in A Free Man’s world, winter never seems to ends.

If you’ll recall, having survived a fourth long English winter – the season that puts the blight in ‘Blighty’ – we left Britain just as the daffodils were starting to bloom. Just as the promise of spring was on the horizon, we were on a flight out of the country. After a couple of weeks in Sweden (as gloomy as Britain but with snow) and Florida (the closest I’ve seen to a summer in what seems like decades) we headed cross the equator into the Antipodean autumn. 

Eight or nine months of winter is one thing, but I’d like to argue that the ’summer’ of 2007 in Britain may as well have been a winter. It rained, rained and then, just for fun, it rained some more. The Thames came unstuck and Oxford was partially under water. Oh, and then it rained some more.  If you look at things in that glass half empty kind of way, it’s basically been winter for us since November of 2006.

As I write to you today, from my own personal Narnia, I’m beaten. I lay prostrate to the gods of winter. What will it take – a virgin sacrifice for Boreas? A snow temple to Skadi? Do I have to slay the White Witch? Because, I’m ready to do whatever it takes. Go on and get Papa’s slaying gear, Baby Z.

The good news is that there are only 39 days until the First Day of Spring. Glorious spring.

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Chet Baker’s “Chet Baker Quartet with Russ Freeman” is available from Chet Baker Quartet & Russ Freeman - Chet Baker Quartet With Russ Freeman.

 
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