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Up to my ears in snow... meteorologically and professionally. I had to get the boat overtrousers out to wade through the stuff and we spent far too much on salopettes for the wee ones to keep them dry. It's their birthdays this week so I'll cheat and tell them the trousers are a birthday present. Don't want to spoil them...

There's been an avalanche of viewer and listener interest in the topic...I don't just mean whose school is open (BOO!) and where's my train gone... I think people want to know how others are coping and we like to nurture our sense of indignation that nobody saw it coming and took action. Mostly, though I think we just get stopped in our tracks by the effect of snow - Nature's cake icing. It makes us stop and wonder. How COULD that happen, we ask. It's like England not getting the World Cup - .

So it's Newsweek on Ice this week. I sit in the warm studio with hot chocolate and a bank of tellys so I can watch the rugby and the cartoons. Meanwhile our reporters around the country stand in remote locations for hours on end to bring us the news. Listen out for James Cook who's in Altnaharra in the Flow Country of Sutherland...he'll be frozen like a lollipop but will sound as enthusiastic as a 10-year-old when school's shut.

Saturday is a big activity day so while those fresh-air lunatics on Out-of-Doors (just before us) tell you ever dafter things to do in the snow, we'll keep it sensible and tell you what conditions are like around Scotland. And we chat to a weather guru about types of snow. For all you historians out there we hear how a bitter winter contributed to Scotland joining the Union in 1707.That's not the kind of info you're going to get from Wikileaks.

We look at the phenomenon of those revelations with, among others, an old newspaper chum of mine from the Ewan MacAskill now in Washington for the . We're asking a question few have so far...why are they treating as a terrorist when it was incompetence on an epic scale that allowed a junior staffer to download so much diplomatic traffic on to a memory stick. That's a case for prosecution at a senior level in the American government, surely?

As (deceased) would say:Don't call me Shirley. Join me tomorrow at 8.