‘I hope you guys had a good time in the snow…’ read the text. What snow? While the rest of the country was engulfed; power cuts; villages cut off; airports and schools closed; lorries abandoned; trains cancelled, Salisbury had nothing but a cold, biting wind and few flurries that would have been more in place on a Head and Shoulders advert.

Ok, so we were spared travel chaos and threat to life and limb – but while the rest of the country frolicked, built snowmen and tobogganed, Salisbury carried on as usual.

It’s been a good six years since we saw any proper snow. The sled lies buried in the garden shed and for Barney the Beagle it is but a distant memory – something he’s not encountered since his first tentative steps outside. And whilst I remember the whitewashed winters of my childhood – snowball fights and days off school, school closures remain something my son can only dream of.

One of my friends feels it even more keenly. At the merest hint of snow anywhere in Europe, she posts the forecast on Facebook and tracks its approach with eager anticipation only to find her hopes dashed as the Salisbury microclimate casts its spell and the snowfall passes us by diverting to Hampshire and Dorset instead.

There is now no doubt (except in the delusional mind of President Trump) that man-made climate change is affecting our weather and that the rash of severe storms that caused such devastation in the Caribbean in the late summer is a portent of things to come. As the planet gets warmer, weather conditions will become more extreme. And since most of our weather comes non-stop across the Atlantic for us that will mean not snow in winter and sun in summer, but more unsettled, wet and windy weather.

Here in Salisbury where five rivers famously meet, the rain that soaks into the nearby chalk downs, discovers light of day in the city.

The natural gravel bed on which the cathedral is built will remain secure and should therefore be good for another 750 years or so.

But the floods of a few years back which burst the banks of our rivers and caused chaos for low lying residencies are likely to become more frequent.

Whilst changes to our weather, a continued absence of snow and the prospect of more rain, may be regrettable, for many in our world climate change spells disaster.

A quarter of Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world is just seven feet above sea level; four million people are immediately threatened.

We British are good at talking about the weather.

The challenge for us all, for our children and our children’s children, is to match those words with deeds.