On Monday night we reached a kind of solstice, a seasonal waypoint, a marker in the meandering turn of the Earth's humdrum progression round the sun.

Sometime after midnight - between about 2AM and 4AM Paris time, to be less vague, the temperature dropped below 14 degrees in the French capital; and 14 degrees celsius at the time was the exact temperature in Wellington. Albeit in the middle of the day.

This is the first time since Spring, according to my cunning and omniscient weather software, that the temperature in Wellington has been higher than in Paris. Even for a nano-second.

Sometime in the next month, maybe after we end daylight saving and return to daylight wasting, we will mark the day when freezing, bitterly cold and unwelcoming Wellington reaches a higher maximum daily temperature than Paris on the same calendar date.

And then it will be time to go home.