Just when I was about to give up on the horror stories about this being the "worst winter ever on record ever" (The Daily Express) and "Second Ice Age ahoy! And it's probably all the fault of asylum seekers, Islamic fundamentalists, and/or single parents!" (The Daily Mail), along came "White Friday", as it shall furthermore be known.

I'd only popped out for a lung-full of brick dust from the Broadway redevelopment at lunchtime and although cold, the weather was clear and bright. Within an hour the sky had turned leaden and apocalyptic, and the snow began to fall, huge chunks of it the size of lumps of cinder toffee misshapes that you get in the pound shops.

By two o'clock it was practically pitch black and someone at the Council with a commendable amount of foresight had despatched a gritter to grind slowly up and down some of the busiest roads viewable from the T&A offices, to the delight of those motorists who had managed to skip off work early to go and put their affairs in order before Armageddon.

By three o'clock someone claimed to have seen a cadre of sabre-toothed tigers surrounding a stranded butcher's boy on a push-bike somewhere near Wrose, and the sports shop near the NCP car park in Bradford was doing a roaring trade selling old tennis rackets as makeshift snow shoes to get through the three or four centimetre drifts that were threatening to flow over the kerbs.

By going home time, I had to wait at the pedestrian crossing while seven hundred male Emperor penguins each balancing an egg on their feet waddled across the road to the Interchange. And, naturally, the roads were completely at a standstill.

Forget your dirty bombs and going to all the trouble to learn how to fly a plane just so as you can crash it into a building, any fanatics or extremists who wish to deliver a fatal blow to Britain's infrastructure need only invent a weather machine that can pump out a couple of hours' worth of snow above any major UK city.

Just what is it that makes the whole place grind to a depressing halt the minute there's the first whiff of the white stuff ? I can understand that people might want to drive a little bit more carefully when the roads are bad - indeed, as I crawled up White Abbey Road on Friday teatime there were people taking care to keep their speed well under 60 mph as they batted up the (non-existent) outside lane.

But it's this domino effect that occurs when just one person takes a look out of the window and mutters: "Looks like snow. Better get off early before the traffic gets bad."

Once this utterance is overheard, it spreads like wildfire around an office. Then people get on the phone to their family, friends are texted, total strangers are e-mailed. "It's going to SNOW! Save yourselves!"

So it took me an hour and a half to get home, when it usually takes about half an hour - even as little as 20 minutes on a good day, with a following wind.

Still, Saturday the next day, eh? Which meant snowman building, a promise I'd been determined to keep since Christmas when Charlie, our two-and-ahalf year old, maintained something of an obsession with snowmen despite the total lack of snow.

And wouldn't you just know it? Totally the wrong kind of snow. Far too powdery and dry to get together in a proper ball. Just kept crumbling away. The resulting snowman, with his woefully undersized head, his plastic bucket hat and his empty tea-lights for eyes, looked like something from a low budget horror movie.

Roll on what must surely soon be described by the Daily Mail as The Hottest Summer On Record In Which You Are Likely To Die From Heat Exhaustion, Skin Cancer or A Giant Bee Sting. I've promised the lad a fantastic sandcastle this year.