It is present when you wake, announcing itself in a change in the colour and consistency of light. Even with the curtains drawn there is a quietness which has seeped into the room. You pull back the bedclothes and stand barefoot, stretch maybe and rise. You open the curtains slightly with your fingers and there it is, a white world.

In Sussex there are only between ten and twenty days a year on average when snow or sleet is recorded. But there is little distinction made between a very light flurry, which lasts for a minute or two, and a heavy fall of snow, which can remain on the ground for several days.

Over the hills of Scotland snowfall rises to over eighty days a year.

A heavy fall of snow ushers in a whole host of changes. The roads sound very different, schools close, a whole new race of beings emerges on corners, in gardens: beings with no legs and carrots for noses, some of whom have brought their own broomsticks. And of course, the news is full of footage of cars skidding down hills, snow-ploughs, drifts as high as hedges, blocked roads, and stories of the valiant who made it to work. Yes, reality has shifted.

Surely the most delightful aspect of snow is the depth of the quietness it brings, once you have seen it there between the curtains, the backyard white, the garden covered. I would surrender everything else, all that apparently needs doing. I would dress up warm, dig out the gloves, two pairs of socks and head out. Early morning is the best time, before everyone else has barely stretched and rubbed their eyes, especially if the snow has fallen in the night, when it is still resting on the twigs of trees. Trees fall asleep in the snow. I always head for a wood or a copse, a place where there are at least some trees, but a woodland is best. Now even a familiar path becomes almost unrecognizable. The world has shifted shape, changed in form; branches leaning lower, the rutted track smoothed. And around the edges of woods and out towards the fields, the journeys made by rabbits, badgers and stoats are there etched in footprints, their presence now visible in a way they would not normally be.

But most of all there is a complete quietening of the aural world. A heavy fall of snow muffles and compresses sound to the point where we can hear our own breathing, our own presence. What it briefly offers is an unrivalled stillness. This is its gift that first hour in the morning, and it is almost rare. And with global warming it will become rarer. This journey into a deep quietness, deep stillness, into this dreaming.

The natural world is a busy place and we become accustomed to it: the sparrows shouting in the hedges, the rooks bargaining with the sky, the constant trembling, shaking of wind and rain, the ceaseless turning of the sea. And Sussex has so many wonderful woods, heathlands and forests, and these are the guardians of this brief and heady silence, held there under a white and even snow sky, there in the hour before the sun rises. Because once the sun rises, this world is gone.

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I always try to sit in a window seat if I can on trains, and especially on planes. On this particular flight the plane had just started its descent into Rome and the pilot’s voice came across the intercom. But instead of the usual run-down of what the temperature was on the ground and how long it would be before we landed, he announced he was going to play some classical music. The reason for this, he said, was that the cloud formations today were so beautiful. He was right. The engines slowed to a hum as we floated into a wonderland of pavilions and cathedrals lit yellow, bronze and pink, through corridors and between great seas. It is impossible to fo