To be honest, today I'm kind of ashamed to be English.

So overnight and this morning it snowed, the snow lay and as I write this we have about two inches of it all on the streets.

(Rather amusingly, as I don't watch the weather reports I only found out it was going to snow because of my Twitter cloud).

I'd planned to visit my mum, so I had a careful drive to her house - my car felt as if it had power steering and as I opened the front door I was greeted by my brother.

I may have mentioned before how my brother is a teacher, he'd gone to school and had been sent home. Apparently half the teachers hadn't turned up to work and a similar number of children were absent. A cleaner had slipped over in the hall (and then a trampoline had fell on her) breaking her leg. The headmaster then decided to send everyone home.

Cue much phoning of parents and writing of letters. Now the streets of Dagenham are more dangerous than normal, not because of of the snow, but because there are gangs of teenage thugs roaming the place.

So everything shuts down - snow is headline news (although as I'm writing this the BBC is showing pictures of puppies in the snow. No dumbing down there...) Why is it I can remember winters like this, but without all the fuss that this current fall is making.

Ernest Shackleton nailed planks from his ship to his feet to trek across hundreds of miles of frozen tundra, but a bit of snow and everything grinds to a halt. That is why today I'm ashamed to be English.

I *am* however looking to racing around icy streets in a big, heavy yellow van tomorrow (although I'm not looking forward to getting up at 5am to do it).