Garth George: Winter time and the living's not so easy

For all that winter has arrived much later than it did last year, I am already feeling the onset of my usual winter mindset - bleak and grey like the temperature and the skies and the bare trees outside our gas-heated lounge. I am not a winter person and look askance at those who proclaim that they are.
For some in this street it is doubtless a blessing that this year the leaf problem is nowhere near what it has been since we moved here. The big old plane tree outside our front fence was the victim of district council vandalism last spring, as were all its peers along the street, mercilessly cut down and replaced with anaemic little things that will take years to mature - some sort of maple, I think.
Those stately plane trees contributed much to the character of our street and, although they were a bit of a nuisance at this time of year, I was thoroughly pissed off when they were cut down. I could have objected when the council notified residents of the intention to remove them, but experience has taught me that civic bureaucracies are generally immovable when they've made up their minds.
Why they could not have been replaced with well-grown natives, I don't know. Probably because they would have cost a few more dollars and a bit more work to transplant.
The onslaught of winter in the past week or so has brought to an end one of the longest (it started early in November) and warmest summers in Rotorua for yonks.
Sadly, it will soon be a memory, for this morning (Tuesday) when I went for my morning walk around the neighbourhood, I was burdened with thermal underwear, a tracksuit, a heavy, padded jacket, woolly hat pulled down over my ears and thick ski gloves.
I hate winter. I loathe the cold; I detest the wind and the rain; I have to force myself to get up every morning, abhor having to take my constitutional before the sun is properly up; and resent having to pull the curtains late in the afternoon to keep the heat in.
The big gas space heater in the lounge is already going morning and night. If there is any consolation in thoughts of the months to come, then it's that gas is much cheaper than electricity or even firewood.
Which reminds me of a German proverb I came across once which says: "Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat."
I suppose I could take consolation, too, that I don't have to live in Invercargill where I was brought up and where winter lasts for seven months or more and what passes for summer is brief. I wrote a couple of years ago that I was hoping that after a few winters in Rotorua, which is much colder than Auckland, I would acclimatise, but that hasn't happened.
I guess I forgot to factor in increasing age, which seems to have made me more sensitive both to heat and to cold. The onset of winter seems to provide a slightly bigger shock to the system as every year goes by.
I simply can't conceive of how elderly folk who can't afford adequate heating manage to survive. But, then, a fair few don't. The death notice index always seems longer in winter.
As Mark Twain put it: "[Winter] is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death."
Garth George is a veteran newspaperman who lives semi-retired in Rotorua.