“If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.” Mark Twain’s remark applies in spades in Old England. Changeable or what?
But one nice thing about retirement which they don’t tell you — and I’m trying to look on the bright side here, you understand — is that the weather you experience really does get a whole lot better. For suddenly you have the freedom to snatch whatever nice half-days there are (and there are quite a few scattered about the average week, even this time of year) and you can get out for a walk in the winter sun. And when it is cold and dank and grey all day, you have the freedom to stick at home in the warm, Reading a Good Book or whatever.
Not that my timetable used to be so very constraining, to be honest. But after a few decades you do rather get into a fixed mindset: Thursdays are work days and so it must be nose to the grindstone.
Not now: these days, it is positively Liberty Hall. Nice morning? Then the proof-correcting can wait. Bitter afternoon (as it is now)? Then it is tea and cake and Haydn and the red pen …
Make mine an Earl Grey.