Am I alone in hoping for this winter’s first honest snowflake?

NOT so long ago, we had proper seasons in Scotland – and long, hard, serious winters. Vividly I recall waking up as a child to the wonderful, ferny patterns of Jack Frost on the inside of our bedroom window.

I remember padding to school on icy pavements, breath smoking in the air, as a pink and weary sun struggled to rise much over the cranes of Scotstoun.

We would have day after day of freezing fog, when you could stand at one end of the school rugby pitch and not see the other. We used to pour water on a sloping section of the playground to freeze for a ‘slide’, and once or twice the boating pond in Victoria Park froze solid, our cue for Saturday scenes of Dickensian revelry.

And there would be joyous days of snow, usually after New Year, when we would have exuberant fights with the white stuff at one end of the pitch as the infants built twiggy, blobby snowmen at the other.

Today, if a school allowed snowball battles and playground Cresta runs, I should imagine the head teacher would probably be arrested. Admittedly, I did once tumble backwards on the slide, bashed my head mightily and regained consciousness in the arms of a ferocious primary mistress, who bore me to the medical room with unwonted tenderness and in short order had me taken home by my parents.

These days, I imagine it would be A&E, reports in triplicate and my parents probably suing the school. But life was at once tougher and gentler then. Most of us walked to and from school, for instance, whatever the weather, in sturdy trenchcoats and scarves and woolly gloves.

Yet this wasn’t back in the 17th century. This was Glasgow in the late 1970s, when Friday night was Crackerjack, Tom Baker was Doctor Who, the pocket calculator was a status symbol and that dreadful woman Would Never Be Prime Minister.

And such weather – the frost, the ice, the chill fog – would last for weeks on end. It would be late February before the crocuses timidly bloomed and well into March before you saw bobbing golden daffodils. May and June would be reliably sunny, while July and August were rather more… Scottish. By mid October the leaves were falling, the lanes were aromatic with garden bonfires and by mid November winter had us in its clench again. But today things are very different. It is not so much that things have changed in the decades since, as that things are now chaotic.

DECEMBER was the wettest December in the recorded history of British weather and January, still not a week old, is already the second-wettest January.

In early November there was a blazing day here in Lewis that was hotter than any day in the whole of July. Indeed, recent years have seen successive long, fine, Indian summer autumns, far from the chill and blustery ones of yore, with much sunshine and minimal rain.

In recent weeks it has been the rain, of course, that has shocked us most – a protracted and pitiless deluge, till the sodden ground could take no more and riverbanks everywhere gave up the ghost.

Water is terrible, for water is patient, lapping, eroding, penetrating, overflowing. We have endured landslides, witnessed bridge collapses, seen an entire Aberdeenshire road washed away and watched all Argyll cut off by land because of a single menacing boulder.

And we have witnessed floods of Biblical horror in, for instance, Hawick, Kelso, Perth, Dumfries, Royal Deeside – to say nothing of still more pitiable scenes in too many towns in northern England, where ill-dredged rivers and inadequate flood defences gave way under all that remorseless rain. Homes and vehicles have been destroyed, townscapes ravaged, parks inundated, riverside pavements swept away, lives lost. We have not gone short of rain in the Outer Hebrides either – but we are used to it, our houses are built and orientated for extreme weather and water runs off this landscape very quickly.

The chief irritation of this winter’s incessant storms – Abigail, Frank and the rest – has been the constant disruption of ferry services. Yet by this point in the New Year there is one small but vital psychological lift. The days are now visibly brighter and each lasts a little longer.

It is nevertheless depressing when the lawn is so sodden that you have to wear wellies to tread it, and disconcerting when, the other day, I saw crocuses and daffodils already showing in a local garden.

The few mornings we have had of crunchy hoar frost – the weekend that brought some light, wet snow – were cherished highlights. This week, with silver skies and northerly wind and no rain, is positively a holiday.

Extreme weather events are inevitably the stuff of fraught politics. The exceptionally cold winter of 1978-79 did as much to destroy the credibility of the Callaghan government as the crazed trades unions.

And there is a clear link between long, hot summer weather and urban delinquency or rioting. Indeed, in the early 1990s, the word ‘hotting’ was coined for young city joy riders, their stolen vehicle of choice apparently being the Vauxhall Corsa. But there was nothing hot about our last really hard winters, 2009-10 and 2010-11, when local authorities struggled as Britain ran rapidly out of grit and road salt. In some cities, such as Edinburgh, refuse collection simply stopped.

One Saturday afternoon, I spent two painful hours shovelling away piled, frozen snow to recover a parking spot outside my elderly parents’ house – by the following evening the space was stolen, the unknown car occupying it defiantly for days.

THE frightful floods, and untold damage, in the Borders and northern England are inevitably discomfiting for a Conservative government, which will always be thought indifferent to northern concerns. But at times SNP ministers have struggled to appear on top of things amidst challenging climatic conditions.

Stewart Stevenson’s floundering performance, after the M8 was shut down by a freak blizzard in December 2010, finally cost him his job. He had sounded far too sanguine on Newsnight Scotland, as dozens of motorists shivered overnight in stranded cars. He then held an unfortunate, toothy photo call in a hat that made him look like Benny from Crossroads and served but to remind us that he was only Transport Minister in the first place on account of years spent taxiing Alex Salmond around Banff and Buchan.

On the other extreme of image consultancy, when David Cameron visited Yorkshire some days ago to pose for cameras with a suitably concerned expression, there was a ridiculous Downing Street flap as to what wellies he should wear. The green Hunter variety would not do – far too posh – and he was finally kitted out in a budget pair from Asda, which might have been fine had they not been so embarrassingly new.

Then there is the hypothesis of man-made climate change, to which the entire political class defers. This has seen our utility bills soar, our countryside clotted with wind farms, and a general obsession with carbon dioxide – an inert and benign gas that plants and trees need for photosynthesis.

Since the general election, there are welcome signs that the Government is rapidly retreating from all that ‘green rubbish’, as David Cameron nearly said. The old phrase ‘global warming’ has been quietly abandoned – the planet has disobligingly refused to grow any hotter since 1998, and anyway climate has always been cyclical and there have always been extreme weather events.

There are legitimate concerns about the recent management of English rivers, about a planning policy that has allowed so much of the landscape to be covered in tarmac and concrete (so excess water has nowhere to go) and a long-standing neglect of roads and bridges.

But generally, this January, we are weary of the sort of grey, mild, damp weather that now seems broadly the same all the year long. Surely I cannot be alone, gazing skywards, waiting in hope for the first honest snowflake?