Reasons to Be Cheerful (continued)

It's the last day of February - always the grimmest month of the year, and particularly dispiriting this time as days and weeks of grey skies and bitter cold have rounded out a winter that was, for the fourth time in five years, colder than usual. Remember those airy pronouncements at the turn of the century about how 'global warming' would put an end to white winters, so that snowfall would become 'a very rare and exciting event'? The Independent notoriously ran a front page to this effect in 2000, looking forward to generations of children growing up with no experience of snow, or even of cold. Since then, of course, snow has become a regular visitor to the Levant, let alone these isles.
 Tomorrow, by some reckonings, is the first day of spring - hurrah for that! But Jim Dale - not the one who played Marshal P. Knutt in Carry On Cowboy, but a senior meteorologist - warns us not to get our hopes up. 'Don't expect spring,' he counsels. 'We'll be fighting raw cold for weeks.' So clearly we're in for a fine warm March. Excellent news.