Four warm thoughts about wonder of winter

IT appears to be winter. Unless you are a fan, you have little choice but to suck it up (being a parent of school age kids, you can’t just jump on a one way flight to a deserted beach hut and stay there, living on coconuts and novels, until spring – the kids would have nobody to check their homework, and would probably get scurvy from all the takeaway pizza).

But rather than just live through winter gritting your chattering teeth, is it possible to embrace it? Instead of looking out at the chilly grey inverted-Tupperware box of a sky, and sighing great wintry sighs, is there any way you could rethink winter so that it is a better place — at least inside your head? It’s a long shot, but you could give it a try. So here goes – the good things:

Films get better. The words ‘summer blockbuster’ tend to wear thin after a couple of months of watching the earth being blown up in 3D, and being numbed by car chases, superheroes, exploding buildings and the wooden hamminess of overpaid stars. At least in winter, you get films that contain actors rather than stars. Cinemas are no longer airless and sticky, and are pleasingly low in texting, popcorn crunching kids. When the weather is awful, you can go and see a film set in the tropics.