...aaaand let's give a nice big Canberra welcome to our old and trusted friend, Winter!

See I've been here nine years now so I'm a) almost a local and b) hooked into the climate here now.  So I now know that Anzac Day, aside from being a day of sombre reflection, also marks the official beginning of the cold weather here in Canberra.

For example - today is a perfectly glorious miserable winter's day.  Maximum of 11 degress, raining on and off with possible storms later, and lots of gusty wind about to add further chill.  And I love it.  I love it so much.  My standard line is a thing about "tundra blood" and being of northern european stock, "you call this cold" blah blah de blah, but days like this you just want to sit on the couch under a favourite blanket and watch dvds or muck about on a games console all day long.

And just check out the forecast for the next several days:

Monday         Mostly fine day.            Min 3    Max 13
Tuesday        Mostly fine day.            Min 6    Max 14
Wednesday   Mostly fine.                  Min 4    Max 14
Thursday       Fine.                            Min   4    Max  15
Friday           Fine.                            Min   4    Max  15
Saturday       Mostly fine,                   Min   3    Max  16

Great stuff.  Finally we get to wear scarves, and layers, and torment little children with cold hands, or, as per my wife's habit, harrass our partners with cold nose nuzzles.  We trudge into the office and the coat stands fill up by 9.  Trips out for a coffee run start needing rock-paper-scissors to decide who goes. 

So yeah, Anzac Day = winter starting. 

And this is how the rest of it works.  Autumn usually starts right on the equinox (March 21st-ish) but this year it didn't arrive until just a couple of weeks ago.  Spring starts in early October or so, then it's brisk to mild until the warm weather starts to kick in from Remembrance Day onwards.  We start getting the hot, dry days come late December with a good blast of a few weeks of temps in the high 30s and early 40s in January.  This year was particularly bad, and not just here of course but right through the inland and coast from Adelaide east.

In February we get a week of cooler weather, with max temps usually in the late teens and early 20s, which promptly freaks all the trees out (they start turning much too early) and provides a signal, through a wonderful autumnal smell in the air that you catch ever so briefly in the evening, that winter's coming eventually.  Then we get another few weeks of hot, blasty, dry and windy weather until mid March.  By which point everyone starts getting sick of daylight saving.  Then it's the equinox and we're back to the cooler weather again.

I reckon late March through to late April is the best time to visit Canberra.  The older suburbs, with their streets lined by well-established oak trees, put on these picturesque diplays.  It's pleasurably cooler in the day and cold enough at night to be snug.

When I was new here I used to get asked how I liked it, having come from Brisbane and calling myself a queenslander, but I have no problems.  I prefer the summers here, without the cloying humidity you deal with closer to the sea.  But autumn and winter, my oh my, for me they are compelling reasons to keep me from thinking about leaving.