If you can’t afford to heat your home, it’s an insult being asked to choose between a bobble hat and electric shoes | Zoe Williams

It used to be that we celebrated the first snowfall, but that's been replaced by talk of how to survive the winter without going bankrupt

It's pretty bracing, this snow, and I don't mean literally. I've been consuming snow-related headlines and news coverage for decades: typically, they'd say, Winter Wonderland", followed by travel chaos"; occasionally, travel chaos leavened by magical snowy landscape". Some years people would try to mix it up a bit - Snowtravaganza" was a low point. You just felt bad for the poor sod who had to live with having written it.

All that has been replaced this year with quite detailed instructions on how to survive the cold without going bankrupt: there was a news segment on the radio about how to turn down the internal temperature of your radiators, if you have a combi boiler. This was not information that lent itself naturally to an aural medium. It was like trying to learn how to remove your own appendix by podcast. Nobody panic - there's also a website! Except, at the same time, everybody panic: it's great to take judicious steps to economise in energy-straitened times, but it's not in any way normal to read experts weighing the relative benefits of wearing a hat indoors and putting mini USB heaters in your shoes.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist