I’m looking out of my window as I write this. And no, that isn’t the prelude to what usually follows such a sentence: a paean to the bucolic English countryside. Quite the opposite: I live in the middle of London, in a road which is never without either cars or people travelling along it, and on which litter seems to gather just as soon as the bin men have disappeared.

Not that I’m complaining: such features are just a part of the very point of cities, the existence of which are an ongoing tribute to the astonishing endeavour and invention of human beings.

No, the reason why I’m looking out of my window with such pleasure is because a few moments ago I realised that life is about to get wonderful again. It’s winter. Properly so. The sun is out, there’s a cold bite to the air, it’s fresh and, at last, the best season of the year has arrived.

How can anyone actually prefer summer? How can they even it enjoy it at all? It has almost nothing to commend it. It gets too hot to do anything without breaking into an unpleasant – and deeply unsociable – sweat. Public transport is unusable, if not actually unsafe. Walking becomes something of an Olympic sport, given the effort it involves. London is invaded by tourists. Step outside your front door and you are confronted by the world’s ugliest people parading mounds of their bare flesh. It’s too hot to eat properly. And sport is a pale imitation of the real meaning of the word (with just one exception to summer’s litany of awfulness: cricket.)

Winter, on the other hand, is something altogether wonderful, when once more it becomes a joy to be alive. Who, after all, wants to eat a steak and chips – in the end, the most perfect of all dishes - in the middle of summer? Who wants a stew?

Ah, summer’s boosters say, there’s nothing better than eating outside. Who are they trying to kid? If you like flies and midges with your meal, perhaps. If you like sunburn, perhaps. And it’s bearable if, for some unfathomable reason, you want to experience the uniquely unpleasant form of hangover acquired when drinking in the sun.

But it doesn’t even come close to the pleasure of a proper winter meal and a real winter drink. A bottle of claret drunk indoors never gave anyone a memorable hangover. And who can possibly enjoy being stuck for months drinking insipid white wine (or, God help us, a ‘spritzer’, possibly the most revolting concoction involving alcohol ever assembled) all day and night, when the alternative is even just a half way decent red wine? Summer drinks: ugh.

This afternoon, London will be packed with crowds clamouring for a look at the England rugby team on their victory parade. Now there’s a proper sport, played at the right time of year. Rugby league – a pretty pointless exercise at the best of times, anyway – now has most of its fixtures in the summer, and few people bother to pay any attention to it any more. The truth of the matter is that real sport takes place in winter; summer sports are for poseurs who affect to enjoy sport, but treat it mainly as an excuse for socialising.

On Wednesday – decent ground permitting - my horse, Spring Dawn, runs in the 1.15 at Leicester. It’s his first race over the big obstacles, and I’ll be something of a nervous wreck. I’ll know by 1.25 whether he’s as good a jumper as I, and his trainer, Nicky Henderson, hope he is. But whatever the result, the real challenge is indeed the taking part. That’s because jump racing is a proper sport, unlike its summer counterpart, flat racing, which is pretty much a waste of everyone except a few high-rolling breeders’ time. It’s like a schoolground game of tiddlywinks compared with a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.

Take the two supposed highlights of racing year, Royal Ascot and Cheltenham. The first, Ascot, is in reality a foul experience, full of obnoxious people who never otherwise go near a racecourse, dressed up in hired morning coats and paying not the slightest attention to the racing. Cheltenham is three – soon to be four – days of total bliss, attended only by genuine racing enthusiasts, with the sport as the central focus, not a pleasant afterthought.

But best of all is the weather itself. I guess if you are born in a tropical rain forest than summer might hold some attractions as something to which you are used. But how anyone else can claim to prefer sweating, burning and stifling to the pure, fresh, invigorating winter wind is quite beyond me.

I’m off for a walk, now. I spent Saturday watching the mighty Spurs demolish Wolves. Tottenham is hardly the most salubrious part of London, and the weather was overcast. But that mattered not a whit as the brisk wind, and Robbie Keane, worked their magic on the crowd. It was a typical winter’s day.

Today, the sky is clear blue, the temperature is vigorous, and winter’s spell beckons. You can keep summer. I’m going to enjoy winter while it lasts.