The light white blankets that make snowflakes of us all

Ihave rather enjoyed this winter because, quite simply, I adore snow. I even know if it has fallen during the night before I hop out of bed from the distinctive reflection of light on the bedroom ceiling, and thrill to the first glimpse of whitemantled garden when I part the curtains.

I revel in how it dramatises scenery, be it a snowy mountain rising from the sea or forest quite transformed into a winter wonderland. I relish the noises different sorts of snow – fluffy, slushy, frosted – make under my boots. and the little footprints of assorted wildlife that rapidly appear in these soft drifts.

I like the mystery of snow. That it is, in fact, largely air, as soon becomes apparent if – in emergency, as once I had to – you try melting some down for water. You need astonishing quantities even to fill a kettle.

Snow, counter-intuitively, is a great insulator, protecting tender plants from deadly frost. a man can perish on a blizzarded hill, but if he digs himself a nice little cave within packed snow, he can survive quite comfortably till morning.

I wonder at the geometric beauty of each fresh snowflake, not least as every one is quite unique, and what snow seems to do to the very elements. Light is quite transformed when snow is lying and when, the other weekend, I padded through the local woods as heavy snow was falling, I was struck by how the sound of the city had quite changed too – all hushed, even muffled, as snow floated thickly downwards in the air.

But not everyone shares my enthusiasm. It is striking how, on the radio or the BBC website, you are always given ‘warnings of snow’. No one ever ‘warns’ you of sunshine or showers.

No sooner has an inch or three fallen than we hear of drivers ‘hit by snow’, and the usual finger-wagging declarations of the bleedin’ obvious from the Met office: ‘Some roads and railways are likely to be affected by snow with longer journey times by road, bus and train services.’

Since, in December 2010, the SNP administration was forced to discard a transport minister after the M8 was closed by a blizzard and commuters had to shiver in their cars all night – Stewart Stevenson had made unwise light of it on telly, and thus invited motions of no confidence – the merest hint of snow is now high Scottish drama.

humza Yousaf immediately convenes the splendidly titled Scottish Government resilience room, then declares this on Twitter and tells us all to be rather careful.

If they decide there is going to be a lot of snow, John Swinney joins him and there are even more apocalyptic tweets.

I like to think of an actual resilience room, an underground bunker like the hideyhole of a James Bond villain, with Nationalist minions running around in yellow and black overalls as the Deputy First Minister, in a vast armchair, strokes a white Persian cat.

all they really do, though, is rack up a sense of drama, with colour-coded alerts and official degrees of approved consternation, as on January 18 when snow on the M74 cut up a bit rough and Mr Yousaf declared the police had upgraded their warning from Stage Three to Stage Four. he added, sternly: ‘That means all travel should be avoided on those parts of the trunk road affected by the amber warning, namely south and south-west Scotland, for the duration of the warning.’

and a senior Police Scotland officer droned: ‘The Stage Four warning has been issued as a result of severe snow showers forecasted for these areas overnight.

‘Police Scotland advises that if you do travel you are likely to experience severe delays of several hours or more.’

They were, of course, quite right: it is wonderful how many people refuse to adapt or cancel travel plans even when there is frightful weather, and that is how most snow-related tragedy happens.

It’s a consequence of our modern and very urbanised economy and the illusion that, regardless of conditions, cars and trains and buses can whizz about as usual.

The trouble is, perhaps, not that it snows in Scotland, but that it does not snow nearly as often and as regularly as, even in the 1970s, it still did.

In countries such as Canada or Sweden, where heavy winter snow is protracted and regular, they cope with it far better.

every town has mighty snowclearing plant, streets and runways and even pavements are electrically heated. There is little disruption and everything keeps moving.

Not us. When the Liberal Democrats were so comprehensively routed from the administration of edinburgh at the 2015 local elections, some pundits blamed it on the trams debacle and others on Nick Clegg’s fateful decision to enter a Tory coalition.

But the real reason was the Lib Dems’ flailing uselessness through the dreadful winters of 2009 and 2010.

For weeks, refuse went uncollected, hundreds of edinburgh streets were left ungritted. The Liberal Democrats, as one journalist crisply put it, had through two successive Decembers reduced the athens of the North to an ‘arctic hovel’.

But blaming politicians is more convenient than convincing. our way of life has changed in important respects over the past 40 years. The majority of mothers with school-age children are in full-time jobs and few of us live within walking distance of our place of work.

These two factors alone make heavy snow a big deal. and – let’s face it – we have grown soft. Most of us no longer keep candles and oil lamps and some emergency supplies of tinned food in our homes. Many of us have neither shovels nor wellies, and it is remarkable how many folk do not even have a heavy winter coat.

Few of us bother, either, to fit our cars with winter tyres – a legal requirement in Scandinavia – or know the safe way to walk in snowy, slippery conditions (like a penguin, really) and indeed how safely to fall.

Back in the 1970s, of course, we were then still very much in the shadow of the Second World War and bore much of its spirit – plucky, resourceful and uncomplaining.

Which reminds me of an old Pe teacher of mine, Jimmy Dodds, who had fought in it before devoting 35 years of his life to toughening up West end Glasgow laddies. Usually by double-period rugby, then some rugby, then more rugby.

But now and then it would snow and the pitch would be half a foot deep in the stuff. Were we suffered to sit inside reading comics?

Not a bit of it. We had to change into our kit, strip to the waist, run outside and have the mother of all snowfights, pelting each other with whooping abandon until Mr Dodds blew his whistle and we were herded in for hot showers.

Were the poor man about today, I suspect he’d be arrested.