Winter will repeat Mae West’s great line on Sunday when spring officially begins. But ‘official’ and ‘real’ are two different things, as Mr. Putin teaches us. So if the US Senate can vote unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent, and winter’s relation to snow grows colder every year, who are we not to drift? The falcon cannot see the falconer; things fall apart, the weather centre cannot hold.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in our world…