There was a time and it was not so very long ago when I would really look forward to the winter.

I loved the long dark nights and the long dark overcoats.

To me, it always resonated with something deep inside.

Not sinister, necessarily, just enjoyably melancholy and perhaps even a touch romantic.

It's a great time for viewing your life as if you were in a film, when, being young, you have the luxury of being so self-possessed.

I indulged myself as a mysterious character treading softly as the screenplay slowly evolved around me, either in the deserted streets of a silent city or in the depths of a barren and bleak countryside.

My happiest times have been experienced in the misty gloom of winter nights.

The thrill of winter: When I was in my 20s, it was walking through unknown avenues in Bologna, Milan or New York or, more prosaically, Liverpool and London, throwing long shadows, running and laughing with friends to shelter from squally rain and hail.

To me, it was just wonderful.

Such a different and unalloyed joy as opposed to the moany way I can easily feel now about being rained on.

A little bit later in life, it was huddling under an abandoned fisherman's shelter on the River Dee, the river flowing thick and dark as ink in deepest Wales. I was with my wife and young family on New Year's Eve, miles away from anyone and everything, and I was stunned by the absolute stillness.

A massive silence observed under a massive sky that you won't ever find in any city, town or village.

It was mystical and I'm sure had something of the old Celtic magic about it.

I felt that I was experiencing something - was even part of something - very old and important yet now totally forgotten.

Well, the more remote stretches of the River Dee at dusk on New Year's Eve can do that to a man.

I listened and watched spellbound as snow fell in sheets on the fields all around us.

It was so quiet, so intense that, eventually, if you tuned in, you could actually hear the snowflakes landing nearby and above on the rickety shelter roof.

After a while, when the sun had disappeared behind the hills and it was becoming pitch black, we trudged back through the snowfield, the only guiding light the rosy glow from the windows of "our" ancient and much-loved cottage.

As we got closer, we could see our hearth-fire was still burning, as always, doing its steadfast duty and twisting peaty-coal smoke up through its hopeless chimney and warming the house...

Now another dark winter lies ahead as yet untouched, and I'm struggling to feel the spell.

I've spent a while analysing why this should be and I've not reached any reliable answers.

It's possibly to do with being pushed further and further into the corporate machine which, at my age, feels infinitely agonising.

Each dragging day teaches me that anyone with a touch of independent thought, let alone a touch of the wanderlust, is drawing down the kiss of death.

Still.

The snow will soon be falling again over the Dee at dusk and it will be mostly unnoticed by anyone.

And even if I won't be there to feel it any more, or see it any more, just knowing that it's happening and that my family's footprints once upon a time were the first and only ones to be there at the approaching dawn of a new year...well...that's fine.