JOHN MacLEOD

For once the authorities did not exaggerate, nor can the Met office be indicted for hyperbole. For hours, yesterday, it snowed without ceasing in central Scotland, as we endured not just the coldest winter’s day in half a decade but the first ‘red’ snow warning in modern Scottish history.

Nor was it our usual fluffy snow, the lightweight and rather damp stuff that regaled us here and there in December. This was dry, powdery and creepy, the snow less of Dickens than Tolstoy.

It formed swift drifts in the winds, insinuated itself through window frames and under doors and even inside train carriages – though that became swiftly academic, as by late Wednesday afternoon no Scotrail service was running.

Normally a walk in snowy woods is a rare and seasonal pleasure. Dogs bound ecstatically about as curtains of falling flakes blanket the forest floor and muffle the normal, rumbling sounds of the city.

Such outings yesterday were not pleasant, as the cold sucked at our extremities and the chill white stuff layered on jackets and, rapidly and once more, the heartland of Scotland ground to a halt.

Many of us are old enough to remember comparable weather, of course – the dreadful freeze of January 1982 (when, at one point, it was –18C in Edinburgh), or the blizzards of 1978 or 1963.

But our lives were much less complex then and, being habituated to the hard winters then commonplace, we all had shovels and wellies and appropriate clothing and abundant stores of, at least, candles and tinned food.

Most of us lived within walking distance of our work and most mothers of school-aged children did not work at all and, with little fuss, we all coped.

Things are, in 2018, very different, with thousands of us now priced out of convenient city-centre residence and most mothers now in full-time employment – and yesterday’s disruptions, cancellations and school closures accordingly the stuff of widespread domestic crises. All the greater because of an evident lack of co-ordination and joined-up thinking in high places.

YESTErDAY’S whiteout was by no means a surprise. We had been chuckling darkly of the Beast from the East for almost a week and we had protracted and extreme winter weather as recently as 2010.

Humza Yousaf and those top Scottish cops not under mysterious investigation seemed scarcely off the TV on Tuesday, exhorting us not to think of driving anywhere, urging us to ponder if any journey was necessary and posting decrees in similar vein on motorway gantries – under which drivers were already inching.

Yet it was only at 8am on Wednesday that councils in Glasgow and Edinburgh decided not to open schools – leaving horrified parents with minutes to organise childcare – followed, within hours, by that apocalyptic red weather warning, with language reminiscent of martial law.

Everyone was suddenly from 3pm onwards ‘exhorted to take immediate action to keep themselves and others safe from the impact of the weather. Widespread damage, travel and power disruption and risk to life is likely, and people must avoid dangerous areas and follow the advice of the emergency services’.

Warnings of this nature always confuse the public, especially those not actually at home when such decrees are issued and whose instinct thereafter is to travel home as quickly as possible.

Yet there did not seem to be the police enforcement one would expect – HGVs, the vehicles that struggle most on icy gradients and are most likely to break down or jack-knife and block highways, were nowhere pulled over.

Mr Yousaf assured us there were more gritting lorries than ever, but there did not seem to be many snowploughs.

The rail network was already grinding to a standstill even before Scotrail decided to suspend services and a colleague en route to Glasgow found himself – and many others – stranded at Paisley, the locomotive unable to go any further because Central Station was jammed with trains.

For all our forewarning, then, industrial Scotland was by Wednesday afternoon largely paralysed, and few of us could even raise a giggle at news that Kent’s Chatham Ski & Snowboard Centre was closed ‘owing to weather conditions’.

For all the maniacal activity of Humza Yousaf – by now, it seemed, in permanent camp at Scotland’s resilience Division – frightful weather had defeated us. Schools were silent, airports closed, trains at a standstill and everyone, everywhere, rushing home as if the world were about to end.

The problem is not that Scotland is having dreadful snow but that we do not have snow often enough to justify the provision of expensive equipment and labour to deal with it.

WE have not endured such weather since January 2011, and the Arctic conditions of that and the winter preceding were the first since 1987.

The calculation has of long standing been that two or three days of disruption are preferable to massive expenditure on resources that, most winters, will not be needed.

It is very different, of course, in realms where hard winters are standard. Canada has an abundance of snowploughs, Stockholm boasts electrically heated pavements and its airport has not closed in half a century. If you live somewhere with snow guaranteed from November to March, you are much better at coping with it.

The SNP administration has no doubt been jumpy this week because of the fate of Stewart Stevenson, made Transport Secretary largely as reward for many humble years chauffeuring Alex Salmond around.

But Stevenson in December 2010 so mishandled our last snow crisis – when hundreds of motorists were stranded overnight on the M8 by a blizzard – that opposition parties laid down a motion of no confidence which the SNP minority government would have lost.

The prospect was forestalled when Stevenson obediently resigned. It was less that he had handled the weather badly than his woeful public relations on the critical day, snapped as he donned a goofy hat that made him look like Benny from Crossroads then making light of the emergency on Newsnight Scotland.

But Humza Yousaf may be in danger of going to the opposite extreme, reducing his resilience duties to so many fetching photo-opportunities and not, perhaps, ensuring those confronting weather emergency are sufficiently resourced and doing their job properly.

Now he doubtless prays for rapid thaw and a tender early spring. Two or three days of chilly inconvenience are one matter. Two or three weeks would assure the fall of more than snowflakes.