I know that by now the snow has gone and the drama it created is over. But I love the beauty of snow; the way it transforms our streets and landscape; the way its unusualness affects our conversations with strangers; and I love the rare, diverse and exuberant outbreak of snowmen in public places.

I also love the way it comes stealthily, as Robert Bridges put it:

“Hushing the latest traffic in the drowsy town,

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing,

Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing,

Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing…..”

If any of your readers know a better poetic description of snow than that I would be delighted to hear from them at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . I mean it!

But then there’s the other aspect of snow. The closed schools; the struggle to get to work; the icy roads; the accidents; the treachery of the pavements; the cost to businesses; the abandoned cars; the blame.

There is no-one to blame for the snow. But in today’s world it seems that there has to be somebody to blame for everything.

I am not making light of this. A lady from Caterham contacted me, justifiably concerned that, having warned the County Highways people that her busy road was unsafe and needed gritting, a van skidded into her shop the next day. Only by luck was no-one hurt.

Some people felt prisoners in their own homes; others couldn’t visit relatives in hospital; long- planned meetings had to be abandoned; flights were cancelled – with the misery of long delays.

The recent snowfall in East Surrey and across the country was exceptional. Can cash strapped Councils be expected to stockpile grit and salt? I know that they do it in Switzerland; but this is not Switzerland. It doesn’t happen very often.

Whilst there are certainly lessons to be learned from what the BBC called “the snow event”, including taking more notice of Met Office advice; perhaps the most important lesson of all is that Nature sometimes does things that we do not expect, and have not prepared for, and which challenge the way we lead our lives.

Nature is far, far bigger and both more beautiful and more terrible than we are. We need to understand that. Our roads may have needed more grit when the snow fell; but so did we.