Winter draws on.

Winter has come to the West Midlands; the first flakes of the season's snow fall invisibly through the late afternoon's darkness, glitter for a moment in the yellowy-orange glow of the street lights and shiver down finally onto the lawns, the roofs of parked cars and the piled-up, wind-blown remains of Autumn's long-fallen leaves.

Do they fall on Hubert, hunkered in a field somewhere, one boggling eyeball frozen to end of a scope?

Nope; no-sirree; no they don't - for Hubert is inside: crouched in the weak field of warmth that's grudgingly given by the ancient storage heaters in his near-Arctic flat; long-john clad, duvet-wrapped, chain-smoking roll-ups and dreaming of summer...