HEAVY WEAR FOR A SNOWFALL

"You ready for the snow then?" asked the lady in the café.

"Is it going to snow then?" I asked, incredulously. It was the first I'd heard of it; normally my Dad is right on top of the weather news.

"What time?" I asked.

"No idea," she said, "Just that me daughter said I should put the heavy wear on the horses anyway."

I didn't really know what that was (though something told me I ought to). I steered the conversation back to the safer ground of the weather forecast.

Snow has such a peculiar effect on us Brits. It is notoriously difficult to predict here, as it seems to depend on a peculiar set of conditions too tricky for a super-computer, despite certain newspapers and a small subset of rather confident people who seem to know exactly when it's on the way.

I didn't dare contradict the café-horse-lady and the report from her daughter. I nodded along sympathetically.

She seemed like the kind of person who appreciated agreement - and so I eventually emerged from the café actually half-convinced that at any minute the grey clouds would shroud the lake, and my afternoon journey back to the office would be obstructed by a snowdrift.

That's my problem - I'm in the other subset; the people who err on the side of it not snowing, because (let's be honest) for most of the time in the UK... it doesn't. And today, on this second-hand report alone, I was sceptical.

This happened once before, in 2010. I told everyone I knew that it was 'unlikely'... and then a few hours later the entire county went into gridlock. We were stuck in the house for two weeks; Flimflambook was white with people building igloos, iced cars were abandoned on the quiet roads, and the air was filled with the sound of kids laughing and dragging plastic toboggans through the park.

So I came back to my desk today and checked a few forecasts.

No snow.

... which of course either means a kind of miserable evening of icy drizzle, or thick avalanches of the white stuff burying the world and all its horses in winter's frosty blanket.

Though, genuinely, I do hope her horses (and indeed, all the horses I know) are alright in their heavy wear, regardless.