Winter starts today; at least it does if you are a weather forecaster and not an astrologist. For those folk, we have another three weeks of autumn to go but meteorologists like to break the seasons up into exact quarters for, as I recall, statistical purposes (solstices and equinoxes fall on different days each year you see).

So today winter starts and will continue until the 1st March when it will be nice and warm once again, with the daffodils bursting through the earth and basking in the spring sunshine.

This autumn I turned 50 which makes it easier to justify the fact that I take at least one picture every and store it on my hard drive, as opposed to Damian Green, who ALLEGEDLY, downloaded legal pornography on his.

Who should be more ashamed, Damian Green for looking at porn, or me for storing pictures of Hampshire landscapes? It’s a tough call I must admit, and one I will leave you to make judgement on.

What will say is that if he looked at consensual porn on his computer in 2008, what has that got to do with how well he’s doing his job in 2017? I am no tory but this does seem like a bit of a witch hunt and personally, I think we should be more alarmed that ex coppers are allowed to leak this sort of stuff.

Anyway, I digress. This blog is predominately to welcome in the winter and reflect on a wonderfully diverse autumn that started warm and ended with hard frosts as the days darkened and the wind took on a northerly flow.

Many of you will have seen the headlines in the world’s worst newspaper (The Express) claiming we are going to have our coldest winter since the Roman invasion, which remarkably does have an influence on people. This was proven at one of our club cricket meetings last week when a member of our committee warned against working on the wicket in February and March as it was forecasted to be frozen for 2 months.

The Met Office have offered a seasonal forecast but this a bit like being given 8 score draws and expecting them to come in as by their own admission, forecasting more than a week ahead is incredibly difficult when small shifts in pressure systems can change wind direction overnight. The difference between a southerly and an easterly is stark.

So what does the Daily Express know that some of the most complex meteorological supercomputers don’t? The answer to that question is it knows fuck all, so don’t read it.

What the Met Office have said is that with the statistics and computer patterns at hand, the indications are that the early winter will be a lot colder than the second half, which may well be largely dominated by mobile westerly winds that will make it generally mild and wet in January and February.

It will be interesting (for me at least) how that pans out as in recent times the Met Office have been getting and better at these seasonal forecasts, even if they are laden with get out clauses courtesy of the ‘Barbecue Summer’ farce a few years back. If you recall, this was when the media took a warmer than usual outlook for summer as a license to write headlines about being ‘HOTTA THAN THE COSTA’ etc etc etc.

So anyway, we will see what happens. One thing is for sure is because I have a dog, I get to experience every day of the seasons and because you are very lucky, I have taken photographs so you can experience them too.

So, without further ado…here is every day of autumn 2017.