There is a woman with an expression on her face that suggests she is not having a good day. She is sitting in her car on the main road at the bottom of our street, looking ahead at the long line of cars heading off into the kind of infinite vanishing point which telly scientist Brian Cox would make sound like the best thing since sliced bread.

I walk past with the children on the way to school, our shoes scuffing in the half-inch or so of snow that has fallen overnight. A couple of hours earlier, I had surfaced from a deep, dreamless sleep to find my wife standing in the dark, staring out the window, muttering, “Oh, God, it’s snowed.”

I’m not sure when the news that it had snowed became a dire threat rather than a eliciting a sense of joy. It’s one of those children-adult things, I think. Snow when you’re a child is the magical dusting on the cake of approaching Christmas. When you are grown up it’s yet another crumbling waystation on the seemingly endless road to hell.

Or perhaps the word “snow” began to make my heart sink to my guts around about the time I moved to Bradford. I’ve never lived anywhere where the snow causes such utter chaos. It is, I presume, due to the fact that you can’t get in or out of the city centre without negotiating at least one steep hill.

The children wonder if school will be closed. I have a slight pang that even if it is, that doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to stay at home with them, making snowmen and rolling in the snow. That sort of thing only happens in sentimental movies. Real life means getting to work.

My wife’s “real life” journey to work takes three hours, to cover a journey of just less than six miles. As I’m crossing the road with the children, the lollipop lady – who by now fully recognises my Thursday morning face as my mind tries to summon up something to write for this space in the paper – points cheerfully at the line of neverending cars and says, “At least you’ll have something for your column this week.”

The line of cars is reminiscent of one of those disaster movies, where people try to escape a zombie apocalypse or impending meteorite strike. It crosses my mind that if such a world-shattering event were to strike Bradford, no-one would be able to get more than half a mile out of the district before everyone was destroyed. Especially if the zombies attacked in winter.

I walk back down the street after dropping off the children at the thankfully-open school. The woman with the face has moved perhaps half-a-car length up the road. She would definitely be zombie fodder by now. I go into the house, my mood dark, and await the end of the world.

It doesn’t come, so I have a coffee and get into the queue to go to work.