It must be Spring

The sun is shining and people are playing pétanque in the gravel next to the pavilion in the middle of my street. Our jackets are open and the air has lost its dampness and its bite. Fewer people seem to feel the need to smoke angrily over their coffee. Such bonheur...

I rejoice in the easy contentment, though mourn the passing of that determined attitude which erects liveliness and life in the streets on chill dark nights. Like the ferociously hot heat lamps under which you sit outside with a coffee and cigarette, while the snow falls around you, the winter way of being strikes you by its uncompromising nature, with its contrast.

I recognise warm weather societies; the European winter has been foreign and surprising.