Winter: please define

This time a year ago we were dealing with the snow brought by the Beast from the East.  For the last three days we have had lunch out on the terrace, the grass has had its first February cut ever and I’ve been drying the laundry outside on the line.  It’s set to revert now to something more like a February/March pattern, but it has been lovely while it lasted.  I have sown lots of flower seed today: dwarf antirrhinums, marigolds, cosmos, penstemons and rudbeckia.  Mr Sutton’s seed packets are a bit of a mix: I got the merest pinch of rudbeckia seeds, and something like 2400 antirrhinums.  The rudbeckia ratio is surprising, given that I harvested millions of them last back end.  We’ll see how the bought and harvested batches compare.