Deep and crisp and even?

Despite the excitable prognostications of the Met Office's finest last night, quite a lot of us didn't wake this morning to a Winter wonderland.

True, there was a bit of soggy-looking snow lying about apologetically in a morning-afterish kind of way, but it's a far cry from that incredible satellite image of the British Isles unbroken white from edge to edge.

However, BBC news had decided the weather would be a major story, so when I tuned in this morning (courtesy of the treadmill at the gym), a shivering reporter was standing on top of the Brecon Beacons to interview a spokesman for Mountain Rescue.

It is a given that any extreme weather event means an interminable series of live reports from regional newsreaders dragged from their warm comfortable desks to the edge of a motorway, a sea-wall or a flood - if it's the latter, they are, of course, contractually obliged to stand ankle-deep in the water.

In this case, editors have had to exercise a certain amount of imagination to make a major news story out of an inch or so of slush and ice; this seemed largely to consist of finding a suitable hilltop - I imagine the rescue services will be less than delighted should they be called out to the aid of the camera crew intent on finding a snowdrift into which they can deposit their hapless reporter.

Two years ago, when a few inches of snow brought the UK to a virtual standstill, I was in Alberta (with downtown Calgary under 5 feet of snow and daytime temperatures of -30C in the Rockies). The valiant attempts by Canadian news teams to politely suppress their mirth as the news of UK airport closures rolled in is a spectacle I shall always cherish.

I'd love to know what they would make of today's reports.

For a reminder of just how spectacular snow can be, there's an astounding collection of Snow Sculptures over at Nourishing Obscurity.