Jeune Street

Jeune Street, Oxford

This was, I was bafflingly told by the Met Office, an "extreme snow event", something akin perhaps to the promise offered by that gravelly-toned voice-over man in cinema trailers who nowadays describes every other new film release as a "major motion picture event".

We, as human beings, uniquely define our experiences with words and words are charged with meaning. We place ourselves at the centre of the universe and assign values to things according to how they affect us and our routine normality. This "worst" snow was nothing more than a precipitation of crystalline water ice on our lands. A crisis? Well, six million people enjoyed a day off work while children cheerily skidded, slid and skated through the most pleasurable day in living memory.