The snow lay across the marsh, fixed by a bone-hard frost. The outside taps had frozen. The car-doors didn’t open till bathed in hot water. I did the outside chores in six layers… and do you know, I was stupid enough to think it was winter.

There were no clouds, the sun was low and intensely bright, doing everything a sun should do except warm the place up. By now I was back at my desk, writing a piece for Radio Times. One of the things about this matchless work-place is that my peripheral vision has grown acute.

Movement. That’s what peripheral vision does best, and since I started working here, I have acquired the habit of instant response to any hint of it. So I swivelled round at once – there really is no excuse for ever doing a stroke of work here – and found more movement.

The bins were beside me as always and I had them to my eyes in an instant – and there was a hare, gold against the snow, hind legs bunched underneath, ready to move at an instant’s notice. And then it was gone: but it wasn’t running away. It was running towards. This was pursuit.

It – he — was chasing another hare with a passion you’d have thought impossible on such a cold day. The two fizzed round in two giant circles and then were still. Here was a foretaste – a foreplay — of spring: two Mad March Hare expressing their madness in January.

It wasn’t the full thing: 20 circuits of the field followed by a stand-up boxing match, preferably with a dozen others involved. But if they weren’t properly mad they were certainly – eccentric. They asked me: winter? This is spring if you but knew it.