As we slide – literally – towards Christmas Day, many people are going to have to rethink their plans because of the weather.

You can’t look at TV footage of families living at Heathrow without feeling sorry for them. Let’s face it, even the two-hour check-in rule is about 90 minutes too long. Discovering that an airport is going to go down as your main place of domicile for tax purposes if the blizzards don’t let up soon can’t be welcome news.

And what if, like a friend of mine, you headed off for the in-laws for the afternoon last weekend to drop off the Christmas presents before heading back home for a quiet Christmas, and five days later find yourself still trapped in their isolated cottage, trying to grit the lane and your teeth at the same time? Doesn’t bear having nightmares about.

However, I can’t help feeling that every snow cloud has a silver lining. Or several. It starts when I’m walking through the snowy park with my husband, both heads down and moving as fast as we can towards the newsagent that sells Christmas trees for last minute incompetents like ourselves, when something catches my eye.

I recognise it straight away. It’s the park. But it’s the park as I used to know it 20 years ago, when I was the mum of a small baby, and didn’t go out to work, and sometimes had a bit of time to walk rather than tear from A to B. In those days, I noticed birds and crocuses and handsome young men playing tennis on the municipal courts. And now, I’ve noticed it again.

“Did you see that?” I say to my husband. “A squirrel looking for nuts.”

My husband, who until now has apparently been training for the ‘speed walking while encumbered by a middle aged woman in mortal fear of falling over’ category of the Winter Olympics, stops.

He’s not a huge squirrel fan per se. Just as he thinks pigeons are just vermin with feathers, he seems to believe that squirrels are just cunning rats that have learned to fan out their tails.

But even he appears cheered by the scene before us, and when an obliging robin flies down in front of us and waves its head around in a very civil manner, I can see he’s quite taken with this winter wonderland. We walk on, more slowly now, and actually look at the snow on the branches and the mute toddlers being pulled on sledges by shivering fathers and when we get to the newsagents we decide we’ll pop in somewhere for a hot chocolate first instead.

Warming our hands on the mugs in the new deli, we watch as more people come in to get out of the snow storm that’s started up again.

“Isn’t it awful!” people I last saw in the playground at the end of the 20th century are saying to each other, and we form a small crowd around the tables, ordering more drinks and ginger cake and swapping stories of husbands still stuck in Zurich and mittens that have got lost in the post. I can’t remember having such a good natter without so much as a mention of Strictly or the X-Factor or the rumour that someone’s husband has run off with the midwife who delivered their twins. It’s what we in Britain do best. Talk about the weather.

The snow won’t last for ever. And there’s bound to be a court of enquiry to agonise over whether we should be spending all the money we save on jump jets on snow chains in the future.

The snow has brought the country to a standstill, and a lot of us are the better for it. And I know I’ve never spent so much money so close to home before, which has to be good.

“That was really nice,” I say to my husband as we’re opening the front door.

We both spot the empty Christmas tree stand.

Damn. Not nice enough to go back out. The weather’s shocking, you know.