MY pal woke up one morning last week and there was snow everywhere. That will teach him to keep his bedroom windows open. He says his old knees are more accurate forecasters than those folk from the Met Office, who were blamed for him having to shovel six inches of "light frost" from his driveway.

My pal is pretty much like the weather, you can't do anything to change either of them. It's best to grin and bear it.

What he knows about climate change his mother taught him. She used to tell him: "It looks as if a hurricane has swept through your room."

That limited knowledge of environmental issues has been the cause of some friction in the igloo he shares with his wife, The Wicked Witch of the East.

He claimed he was trying to save water when she caught him showering with the woman next door.

"This is terrible weather," says The Wicked Witch, who fancies herself as something of an amateur fortune-teller. "It reminds me of the winter of 2012."

The standing joke in Scotland is if you don't like the weather, wait 10 minutes.

But it would appear that what passes for winter up here is considered Arctic Armageddon south of Watford.

It is so cold in London, we are told, that the city's investment bankers have been buying their vintage champagne on a stick.

Some of them have even been spotted with their hands in their own pockets. They have been leaving the country in droves, heading for sunnier climes.

The customer services lines of our major banks are being inundated with folk wanting to know what the weather is like in India.

One farmer turned up for Sunday service to find he was all alone in his country kirk.

"Well," said the vicar, "I suppose there is no point in me holding a service today."

"Is that so?" said the farmer. "Well, if only one cow turns up at feeding time I still feed it."

But at least some women of my pal's former acquaintance are getting their only chance at a white wedding.

It is no laughing matter. Businesses already reeling from the economic freeze have been hit again; schools are closed; transport links severed.

The powers that be complain they have not had this kind of snow for 18 years. So what? Did they learn nothing 18 years ago?

I tell you, London will be in real trouble if terrorists ever hijack Aviemore's snow-making machines.

And we shouldn't gloat. We are just as helpless, just as ill-prepared for white-outs.

But don't knock the weather. If it was not for our climate, most folk would not know how to start a conversation, the news outlets would have nothing to report 24 hours a day and today I would still be staring at an empty page.

Winter is what sensible people go south in, which my pal now knows to his cost.

He bought an old sandstone villa in Cambuslang from two sisters in their 80s, who were downsizing.

As the estate agents would say, the house was "in need of some modernisation", which is shorthand for saying it should have been knocked down and rebuilt.

But these two old buddies were in great health, so if they could live there all these years, my pal saw no problems. Until, that is, the first time the temperature plunged below zero.

My pal and The Wicked Witch woke to find ice forming on their walls - from the inside.

He phoned the sisters in their double-glazed, centrally heated cosy wee flat to ask how they had managed to keep warm all those winters.

Back came the reply: "Oh, for three months every year we closed the house and went to Tenerife."