His failure to publish must have been frustrating, but given his approach, the rejections he received were surprisingly mild: 'untimely', 'not contemporary', guilty of philosophizing.

These strong southwesterlies have also brought us surprisingly mild days and nights.

In fact the response so far has been surprisingly mild.

But even though the rest of that autumn remained bitterly cold, it was followed by another weather flip when the winter turned out to be surprisingly mild.