Seasonal disorder

Good morning - dark, isn't it? There is a scientific explanation for that, as there is for so many things. Today is the winter solstice. The sun rises at 8.04am at Greenwich, and later in most of the rest of the country. It is also, according to some pedants, the first day of winter. Which cannot be right, because that puts most of December in the autumn and takes most of March out of spring.

Good morning. Dark, isn't it? There is a scientific explanation for that, as there is for so many things. Today is the winter solstice. The sun rises at 8.04am at Greenwich, and later in most of the rest of the country. It is also, according to some pedants, the first day of winter. Which cannot be right, because that puts most of December in the autumn and takes most of March out of spring.

No doubt we are about to discover that the Government has set up a task force chaired by Michael Fish (the man who missed the great hurricane of 1987) to look at the designation of seasons. It is bound to conclude that we should move to a six-season year, abolishing winter altogether and dividing each of the remaining seasons in two. This will improve our national productivity, reducing losses to business caused by seasonal affective disorder and allowing retail establishments to increase the number of sales by 50 per cent. It may even help us avoid a recession.

Traditionalists may cavil, but as New Labourites so often say, when the world changes – or in this case when the world's climate changes – we must modernise or die. Welcome to late autumn.