You can talk about a ‘dusting on the hills’ or ‘flurries on the breeze’. But you can bet your bottom dollar that not long after, people will be queuing up in the supermarkets to buy up bread and milk and sugar. And they will be telling one another that ‘there’s a blizzard on the way’.

But why the panic? Heavy snowfall is rare in our part of the country. You have to go back to the winter of 1982 before Bristol, and Bath were really brought to a standstill. That was the winter when even the Queen had to take shelter from a blizzard in a Gloucestershire inn.

It was one of those rare occasions when we actually did have blizzards - a Force 7 wind, moderate or heavy snow and a visibility of less than 200 metres, causing drifting.

Most of our snow, like our rain, comes from the West. From that direction an inch of rain is equivalent to about a foot of snow. That tends to be quite wet - good for making snowballs.

Snow blowing from the East is drier and more prone to drifting and what would fall as an inch of rain in warmer weather can fall as two feet of snow. This is what makes snow forecasting so difficult - any errors are greatly magnified.

Snow takes many forms - the Met office recognises flakes, grains, pellets (known as graupel) and - in very cold weather - diamond dust. But in Greenland they have over 50 different words to describe snow and ice.

Have you ever noticed how quiet it is when it snows. That’s because snow also has a wonderful sound deadening quality as it falls.

But snow that’s been lying for several days stops heat rising from the ground and reflects sunlight back out into space.

That’s why on a clear, snow-covered night we see record-breaking low temperatures. And sound carries a long way on hard packed snow.

It is very rare for there not to be at least one significant fall of snow each winter. No matter how well we forecast the snow panic seems to set in and the roads grind to a standstill.

Global warming may make snow a less frequent sight in the West but we usually get a snowy winter about every 20 years - which makes the next one due any time now!