It may be hard to remember this now — and near impossible to feel it in our bones. Not only does the announcement fall in the month with the shortest day (a London day will last 7 hours and 53 minutes on December 21, compared with a whopping 16 hours and 38 minutes on June 21) but our sunny year was heavily frontloaded, giving us a miraculously bright spring and summer before petering out into more natural meteorological territory in autumn. By winter, it was all a distant memory.