There's just something about cold mornings which really appeals to me. In that way, I'm perfectly suited to life here in Canberra.

This morning, when I got out of bed at 7.00, it was a heady -3.5 degrees outside, and the view through the kitchen window was of a world rimed with white. The frost was so heavily settled that for a moment or two I actually thought it might have snowed during the evening: the roof of the house across the road was coated with a thin skin of darkly glimmering ice. In...