Why does our country fall apart at the first snowflake? Because secretly we love it!

Why does our country fall apart at the first snowflake? Because secretly we love it, says one American who’s based here

Even the most sneering stereotypes of British weather cannot adequately prepare the foreigner for their first winter here. In my first December on these isles (admittedly, as a rather somnolent postgrad), I frequently woke up to the realisation that what seemed to be dawn poking sadly through the curtains was, in fact, dusk. “Well that’s that,” I’d mutter, dropping the curtain across the window and staggering back to bed.

Despite such sharply circumscribed waking hours, I found time to report home that Britain seemed to have only two seasons (I named them “light grey” and “dark grey”) and to query whether the sun had ever actually risen on the British .. Alcohol, and the impulse to go out and conquer a handful of warmer continents, had never seemed more sensible.

Still, I found it hard to specify what was quite so evil about British winters. Scandinavia’s are far darker, and those I knew as a child in New England were far colder. What I missed, I soon realised, was snow.

The best thing about snow is how it brightens even the darkest days and nights. The usual rants about British weather mistakenly focus on rain or temperature. The real problem, which snow solves, is light. In winter sunlight a covering of snow glitters more than the sea, and on grey days a snowpack can still be gently luminous. Even an overcast night will never quite get dark in a snowy landscape.

So it was the snow I longed for. Then last year and now this, London has been graced with a number of three-dimensional snowfalls that didn’t immediately melt or wash away. And to my great surprise, I discovered that snow here is often a more magical experience.

For one thing, it’s a pleasure to be in a place where most people seem to like it. Nearly everyone I know in Britain finds snow to be both exciting and special. Simply because of its rarity, a show-stopping, Gatwick-hobbling British snowfall remains a perfectly acceptable occasion for sober-minded adults to become joyfully animated. It’s easy for those from North America to poke fun at the hysteria engendered by British snow (cue the breathless Met Office “severe” warnings for 2-4cm), but it’s much more fun to join in.

The British excitement contrasts sharply with the complaints and almost military measures with which New England greets its winters. No sooner do flakes start to fly on a Vermont or Massachusetts road than enormous, double-bladed snowploughs sideline them into their appointed place. While runways and highways are kept clear for commerce, I’ve never seen in Boston the happy scenes I see on snowy weekends in London parks, packed with amateur photographers, exuberant dogs, smiling couples and families playing in the snow.

If I were to rank Britain’s sartorial surprises for the foreigner, first place without question goes to the attire of some young ladies I once saw on a bitterly cold January night in Newcastle. A close second, though, is the sight of Londoners gearing up in winter hats, scarves and gloves as soon as the temperature drops much below 15C. But these indulgent layers of winter wear now seem, like the inevitable Christmas snow on EastEnders, to be a kind of pleasure-taking in the rituals and turnings of the seasons. If they don’t turn quite as much as they used to, then our minds are correct nostalgically to elide the beauty of a snow-covered landscape with our own distant pasts — as indeed many British children will remember this winter’s snowstorms, and the days off school, all their lives.

They don’t know how lucky they are. In New England, “snow days” are tacked back on at the end of the school year. If I try to pinpoint when the innocence of childhood really began to crumble, I think not of discovering the truth about Santa Claus, but of those days in late June or early July when the government would tally up the joy we’d had the previous winter and set about reclaiming its pound of flesh.

Britain is less organised after a snowfall. In contemplating the seized-up roads, the frozen railways, the cows that, like the poet François Villon, die from thirst beside the fountain, I have to ask: how can the homeland of intrepid explorers such as Hudson, Scott, Frobisher and Shackleton be so incompetent in dealing with winter?

I’m beginning to suspect that the lack of preparedness is entirely intentional: a vast, national conspiracy to make sure that no one has to go to work or school when a short-lived and deeply loved winter wonderland descends.

My evidence includes how few non-commentators actually complain about the transportation chaos; the enthusiastic annual wagering on the odds of a white Christmas; and the ubiquity of sledges in our nearby park whenever it snows, though in a decade here I have never seen a snow shovel.

Britain is now sauntering casually through another winter, as notoriously and conveniently unprepared as it was last year and the year before.

Survey the chaos that the snowflakes conjure: a changed and beautiful landscape, utterly silent streets, and parks filled with quiveringly happy children, arm-in-arm couples and office workers who can’t believe their great good luck in having such a magnificent day off.

Winter reigns, and I suspect Britain is just as ready as it wants to be.