At least the snow didn't catch us unawares And so, the snows have come and gone. Too early to put the sled away, and to hear the faint cry of the "hounds of spring on winter's traces," but if and when the great white-out hits again, we'll be well prepared, same as last week, and 2010 and all the other years when it snowed more than an inch. At least it didn't catch us unawares, as it usually does. Snow in winter! Up there with the shock of leaves falling in autumn, leaving the railways aghast and powerless to move. This time the Met Office saw the snow clouds gathering on the horizon, unlike Michael Fish's Great Wind of "87, and the recent sudden discovery that global warming isn't delivering the expected goods on time. Talking of weather reports, why is it necessary for them to talk of "bitter"cold, as soon as the glass drops below zero? Twenty degrees below, that's "bitterly" cold, and we'd know all about it but for the good old Gulf Stream. We're just about on the same meridian as Montreal, Canada, whose residents don't enjoy the benefit of warm Caribbean waters drifting offshore, and who spend from October to March up to their armpits in the deep, crisp and even. If you want to know "bitter cold," talk to the Québécois. And it had better be in French. There is a small groundswell of opinion that holds that if we didn't have the benefit of temperate waters, we'd have long since learnt to cope better with extremes of winter weather, but I'm not so sure. The early Met warning this year made not the slightest difference to Heathrow or the trains: they ground to a halt as usual. Nor, indeed, to the roads and lanes around my simple bothy, never having seen sight nor sound of a gritting lorry. The propensity of television news to take the viewer for a numpty is never more evident than when it snows: just in case we don't recognise the white stuff and its attendant freezing condition, unfortunate reporters are stuck outside, preferably in the worst of the blizzard, red-nosed, teeth chattering with cold, looking more snowman than human, to tell us what we've already been looking at for hours. I watched a poor devil report on conditions in Northumbria who looked as if he had fallen into a snowdrift, or sadly (and more likely), had his cameraman cover him in snow in the interests of a reality-seeking editor. Why some foolhardy souls wish to risk their lives climbing mountains in snowstorms is something most of us find hard to fathom, while applauding the search-and-rescue teams that are risking theirs to try to save them. Unsung heroes, like the legendary Scottish saint of the snow, Mrs McKay, whom my radio listeners elevated to fame as her whirling silver shovel kept the infamous Cockbridge to Tomintoul road clear in conditions that would make a Montreal native shiver. It brings out the best, and the worst, in us, our weather.