Why does the prospect of no more snow fill us with such horror?

Why isn’t a blizzard funny? Because snow joke.

If you’re unlucky, you might find a variant of that gag (if it even deserves the term) on a Christmas cracker this year. You won’t laugh. Just as you won’t if you open the front door and find your car – or your cat – has been buried in a snowstorm.

As an adult, a decent fall of the white stuff will almost certainly create inconvenience. For one thing, you can’t get anywhere. Railways, which have learned nothing since Thomas the Tank Engine got stuck in a drift in 1949, barely cope at all with snow. Roads, begrudgingly gritted, fare little better.

Even if you could travel (and I’m not accounting for pandemics in all of this), you probably wouldn’t be able to because your child’s school would almost certainly have announced a “snow day” – everything naturally needing a label in our identity obsessed world.

Not that the closing of the school gates is ever simple.

You sit by the phone, waiting in dread for a text that will confirm the worst. “Do we get to stay at home?” come gleeful shrieks. Yet nothing comes and so the kids are scarfed, hatted, gloved and booted – only for a ping to resonate from your pocket the moment you step outside. And then you’re stuck with the blighters, while also trying to juggle work, angry pets and salting the front step before the postman arrives and takes a tumble.

Despite all of this, however, last week’s news that snow will soon no longer settle in most of the UK was met with almost universal horror. It may be the weather that causes us the most aggravation, but it’s the weather we seemingly don’t want to do without. There’s a Brexit parallel there somewhere if you only look hard enough (then again, there usually is, isn’t there?).

To a degree, our love of snow reflects its rarity value – especially for people living in the southern half of England. And, of course, the increasing scarcity of heavy falls means their association with the past becomes ever stronger – and nostalgia exerts a heavy force on a nation that would give away its right arm for a glimpse of a Spitfire flying low over an oak wood on a frosty day.

The other key association is with magic. True, snow can look “magical” – as we have probably all remarked when we’ve opened the curtains to see a fresh white carpet. But all you need is a cursory knowledge of children’s literature to know that snow and magic really do go hand in hand. Hogwarts castle was built to be snowed on; Narnia’s chill may be the result of bad magic, but it’s magic all the same. And snowmen can fly, you know.

And if all that wasn’t enough, we spend most of the year dreaming of a white Christmas. In northern Scotland, you might have a decent chance of seeing one (there has been snow on Christmas Day there on 34 occasions since 1960), but in the south of England, flakes have fallen on 25 December 10 times in the past six decades. That doesn’t stop snowy landscapes dominating the Christmas card market.

Our affection for what Thomas called “silly soft stuff” is, in the cold light of a snowy day, a load of old nonsense. But I cannot help but fall for it.

After all, there are few sights more beautiful than freshly fallen snow beneath clearing skies. It holds out memories (however rare) of joyful childish fun, and the hope of more to come. And for as long as it lies undisturbed and ungreyed, softening the harsh sounds of normal life, we can somehow feel convinced that the world can be made pure; cured of its ills.

No wonder that the prospect of no snow makes us so uncomfortable. What’s more, the fact that its disappearance is the result of man-made climate change means we only have ourselves to blame – way to go, mankind. Still, that in turn means that if we really want to carry on dreaming of snowmen, tobogganing and the occasional white Christmas, it’s up to us to do something about it. And we need to crack on with it.

More snow might equal more inconvenience but if future blizzards also signal a reversal of climate change, the disruption will be worth it a hundred times. And anyway, it doesn’t half look pretty. So, forget the trouble it causes – let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.