I'm just going outside ...

When the snow begins to fall in this part of the world otherwise normal and well-balanced individuals trip their switches and begin to operate in unusual and outlandish ways. Ours is a landscape where, not so very long ago, many of the hills were topped with the black drifts of coal waste-tips and on washing days, when clean white sheets were hung out to dry, they would, if the wind blew from those tips, turn into weird, dark canvases. The more artistically inclined voters among the populace would stand, then, and stare at them because the sooty bed-linen would become uncomfortably reminiscent of the works of Dore or Goya. Eventually the starers would move off, pensive and talking quietly amongst themselves, to add a kind of morose rive gauche quality to the general gloom of the valley. Perhaps it is this racial memory of creeping blackness that triggers brains around here to regard white flakes falling from a low grey sky as some kind of heavenly sign that an apocalypse is near.

The first flurries of snow began to fall around midday. By 2 p.m. the world is turned upside down.

In the supermarket all of the tills have lines that stretch back well into the aisles and every trolley in those lines is stocked with bread, potatoes, milk and, among the more far-sighted, a certain amount of alcohol.

There is a worrying buzz in the store, too. It is like the sound that you hear when you've opened a long-neglected garden-shed to find that a colony of assertive wasps has moved in during your absence. For the shoppers are uneasy; outside the snow is falling, and inside stocks are running low.

The white sliced-bread is already gone and some elements, strangers to the vocabulary, are being driven to make hopeful, but ultimately uninformed, choices between pain rustique, coppia ferrarese and bauernbrot. Others, only previously familiar with smooth plastic-wrapped loaves,  stare helplessly at the knobbly, naked splendour of stacked sourdoughs, or pick in a distracted way at the organic bloomers' golden crusts. Among the vegetables, too, circumstance forces hands. With the potatoes running low, shoppers scrabble for the last tubers remaining.  A small and determined group of toothless, grey-haired women forms up into a phalanx and drives forward through a wall of surprised shoppers to snatch bags of Maris Piper and King Edwards; then, hot with victory, the wiry testudo heads off to hunt out the small remaining reserves of teabags and Hobnobs.

I decide that I am not equal to the ordeal of entering the lists for the single pack of cat-food that was to be my only purchase, for trolleys are stacked six-deep, and, tempers frayed, normal people threaten to become zombies. The buzz in the aisles is a guttural growl at the tills.  A young woman deftly slips her basket on a belt, just in front of a family already unpacking their load of shopping. "Don't mind, do you, love!" she brays loudly, in the direction of the mother.

Deciding that I am not suitably armed for this battle, I guiltily put the cat-food down amongst some aubergines in a display and slink out of the store.

There are big snowflakes falling on the car park. Two drivers  threaten one another over a single parking-space, and a crawling line of cars stretches towards the petrol station where, no doubt, the pumps will soon be empty. I start my own car quietly and, with great caution, ease it away from the store and out onto the dual carriageway.

The traffic is reduced to a single line in the white gloom as we feel our way down the valley, headlights and wipers working overtime ... except for a young lady in the sporty little Fiesta, who flies by in the outside lane at 70 mph, car-horn defiantly blaring  'La Cucaracha'. Perhaps she's a zombie already.