'Do not go out unless absolutely necessary'

Of the pieces of advice dished out during the cold snap, the most useless and vacuous must be the advice not to venture out unless absolutely necessary. What weight and value does such advice carry? Who is to decide what is necessary? Presumably if you are a doctor or nurse, your work is necessary. What if you work in a fast food chain flipping unhealthy burgers? Far from being necessary, staying at home might even help the nation's arteries.

I am not suggesting we can't cope with bad weather. The UK is a fairly temperate place, which means we are not used to coping with extreme weather and do not have the systems in place to deal with it. In fact the longer it lasts, the better we seem to cope. In Birmingham, snow really arrived in the middle of last week and this led to school closures and work places were also affected. Yet driving conditions, and conditions for pedestrians, were far worse yesterday, when there was hardly any disruption. Which just goes to show that if this became a regular occurrence, we would just adapt pretty fast.

Finally, various figures have been thrown around to illustrate the scale of financial loss owing to the bad weather. It does look as if these figures are just plucked from the air. How can such calculations be made so quickly? In any case, it is not as if the loss falls in one place; as if suddenly a single account has had millions debited from it.