It’s here and you can feel it, can’t you?
Early in the morning, before the sun breaks through, you can feel it in the way your toes curl up ever so deliciously in your blanket.
In the way you snuggle ever deeper, a half-smile playing on your face as you enjoy the delicious warmth that lying perfectly still in your blanket brings.
You can feel it after you get up, and take a look at the thick layer of fog that hangs over an entire city. The sun tries, ever so weakly, to assert itself, but nobody is in any mood to listen, and so it retreats, half-apologetically, to make a stronger appearance later on in the day. But its reappearance brings only dappled sunlight at best, and none of the heat that piles on so mercilessly the rest of the year.
You can feel it in the first sip of chai, as the scalding hot liquid makes its way down your gullet, providing a little bit of heat and spice to your innards.
Why, the steam rising up from the cup alone is enough to make you feel it. Although if you are anything like me, you might choose to have a second cup, just to be really sure.
The number of jackets, sweaters, caps, gloves and mufflers that you see on the many people out and about in the early morning is an important clue. Those on bikes sans gloves can be seen vigorously rubbing their hands together as they wait at a traffic signal, and while you wish they’d worn gloves, you can’t help but smile, for it is further proof that it’s here.
Keen appetites, and a hankering for an extra cup of coffee during the day is further proof – as if it were still needed.
There’s no chance of the fan being turned on now of course, and maybe the AC remote will be better off with the batteries removed. A vague desire to keep a sweater on your back during the afternoon, and a rather more resolute desire on your way back from work adds credence to a well formed belief.
And finally, and gloriously, it is felt in couple of stiff ones that you may choose to knock back once you’re back in the warmth of your home.
As it is felt, if you will allow me one final piece of evidence, in the gloriously charred piece of meat or vegetable that you partake of from a barbecue that just so happens to be in your vicinity. Both of these last to be repeated as often as is necessary, of course, and maybe more than is strictly necessary.
In all of these and so many more, you can feel the presence of that most welcome of seasons, that harbinger of peace and happiness, that magical time when life is truly wonderful in this, the best of all cities.
I am most pleased to announce, ladies and gentlemen, that it is time.
Winter, praised be the lord, is here.
~~
He doesn't expect the paradox to be resolved in his lifetime
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