There was a time when the first weekend of the new year meant immersion in what we kindly describe as rugby for the purists. The dark days between Christmas and spring are not easy for anyone, but they are largely responsible for giving rugby a bad name in this part of the world. Ten-man rugby, like asceticism, was pretty much invented for January.

Yet it is a concept that these days feels totally alien to the Premiership. An icy blast this weekend may yet precipitate a sudden tightening of coats, but such sobriety would represent quite the about-turn of current trends.

Premiership Rugby is about to announce more records for attendances and television audiences over the festive period, with six out of 10 matches proving to be sellouts. When one of those is at the big stadium in Twickenham, where Harlequins and Leicester indulged in an eight-try thriller last weekend in front of 84,000, amateur rugby in the 20th century feels a long way away.

Only slightly less far away seems the Premiership final at the same place last season. We have a rerun of that match this weekend, when Bath travel to Northampton on Sunday, which is also the return fixture of the opening game of this season. We are at the halfway stage of the league programme, and the champions might very well think of last year’s final as from another time and place.

Unless they have achieved serial-champion status, like Saracens of late, or Wasps or Leicester in years gone by, there are few things worse for a side’s prospects than to be crowned champions the season before. Meanwhile, coming close in a final can sharpen up motivation no end.

So seems to be the dynamic here. Bath have not won a title since those distant days of the 20th century, when it was they who were serial champions, but they have pushed on from that disappointment in last season’s final to claim eight out of nine wins so far, comfortably top of the table, comfortably the most prolific try-scorers and the most parsimonious – or the least generous – try-conceders.

Northampton, meanwhile, sit in eighth. That opening match did not go well for them at the Rec. The dynamic was classic: champions travelling to the lair of the side they had just beaten to the silverware, missing a number of important players, either departed or injured. The subsequent 38-16 defeat will have reminded them, if that were necessary, that to play the new champions puts a spring in the step of every team.

That said, four wins from nine is hardly an implosion. They are actually third highest try-scorers – although last weekend’s 61-0 win over Newcastle has helped there – and only three sides have conceded fewer, so their game is in decent order. No arguments, either, with the start to their campaign in the Champions Cup, winning in as inhospitable a venue as Loftus Versfeld, Pretoria. But they have lost every away game in the Premiership.

Next most prolific, after Bath, are Bristol. The opposite applies to them. They cannot stop winning on the road, where their extravagant rugby seems to find its fullest expression. They are responsible for Bath’s solitary defeat in the Premiership, and their victory at Welford Road before Christmas featured one of the most extraordinary first-half performances in memory. Then they go and lose 38-0 at home to Sale last weekend.

If the English game has moved on from the 10-man rugby for which it was so famous, Bristol have surpassed Harlequins as best representing the new flamboyance. Such rugby is inherently mercurial, too, lending a flightiness and inconsistency for which the English have not been renowned.

Bristol are away this weekend, which, after a humiliating home defeat, might suggest they are bound to be unplayable. But they travel to Saracens on Saturday evening, and Saracens – get this – are coming off a 60-point hiding of their own, at Bath. Saracens may be enjoying the chance to rebuild without the weight of the champion status to which they have become so accustomed, but results like that, even with the latest first-half red card for an accident, are as indicative as any of the surreal distortion of all we thought we knew about winter rugby in England.

Make the most of it, though. The Premiership breaks after this weekend for a couple of weeks of Champions Cup rugby, before one solitary round without international players – and then it is lights out for two months, as the Six Nations takes over.

The problems in English rugby, which take in such varied issues as calendar, finance and welfare, are still live and ominous, but perhaps the deepest cultural malaise of all – stultifying rugby in the dark days of winter – does seem to have lifted. Which is reason enough to keep believing.