It may take seven hours to get to work, and it may lead to the odd broken limb, but the recent snow has a sliver lining.

I don’t mean how pretty the landscape looks or the fact that it covers up litter. To my mind, the biggest advantage is that children are asking to go outside to play. Not only are they asking, they are begging.

“Can we go sledging after school?” my children ask, despite it being almost dark when they get home.

Weekends have seen them with great gangs of friends, walking to the small excuse for a hill near our home, to sledge.

I’ve been along too, and its all very different from when were children. There wasn’t a plastic sack in sight. When we were young we would all take sacks, some of them stuffed with straw or old bits of carpet, and use them as sledges.

We’d work up quite a speed as we hurtled down a natural gully at the side of The Warren, a foothill beneath the Cleveland Hills. After a few of us had been down it was sheer ice and resembled the famous Cresta Run. We went terrific speeds.

Now there are all manner of fancy sledges. Some look like storage boxes people fix to car roofs, while others resemble mini toboggans. I was shocked to spot a selection of similar-looking models in a newspaper, each costing more than the car I’ve just sold.

Websites offer up more expensive ones. Take the 180-X airboard - ‘designed to be pushed to the limits of sledge riding. Ideal for steep slopes, parks and plenty of big crashes.’ A snip at £299. And the cheaper – only £69 – 130X airboard sledge, which is ‘perfect for children and back garden sledging’.

I’m glad to say that sledges like this were the exception, and the majority were far more basic, but they were shop-bought all the same. I can’t pretend my children were any different, sporting an inflatable ‘Snow Monster’ rubber ring with handles, bought as a gift.

So it was up to us adults to show them how to have fun on a budget of nil. We went along with plastic bags, a large plastic advert I’d removed from the ring road and a For Sale sign. What fun we had. Then one of my daughter’s friends brought along a tea tray which made a great snow board. Everyone wanted a go.

Children may not have the imagination we had – but a few more weeks of the white stuff and they’ll be digging out bin bags and dustbin lids. But best of all, they forget their mobile phones and Xboxes – at least temporarily.