Summer is starting somewhere and ending somewhere right now.

The question my son asked is one of those questions that looks simple and isn't. Where is winter? Right now — not in a season, but in space. On this same planet, in this same moment, what is the weather like somewhere else?

He's eight. Before today, I don't think it had fully landed for him that the planet has two sides running on opposite schedules. That while we pour gazpacho into cold glasses, a family in Santiago de Chile is making soup to warm up. That the children in Melbourne went back to school last week because their July is our January.

The World Cup helps with this. Forty-eight teams means the group stages have included matches played in Canadian winter stadium conditions and matches played in Mexican heat. The commentators mention it. The players wear different amounts of clothing in warm-ups. The camera cuts from the pitch to the crowd and the crowd is in parkas or t-shirts depending on where the match is.

My son noticed this three days ago. 'Why do some people have jackets?' I explained. Today he asked where winter is.

This is how geography works when it's actually learned: not through memorising capitals but through noticing a discrepancy — the people in parkas at a football match in July — and following the question it generates.