Who's the Daddy: The joy of snow is for the young

After that, it’s an absolute pain in the backside, literally, when you slip on it and land on your fundament.

Last Saturday me and the boss took our supersonic sighthound Walter to Williamson Park, where we were greeted with a sight straight out of a Chas Jacobs painting. Hundreds of people skidding down the slopes around the Ashton Memorial on whatever came to hand, compacting the snow on footpaths until they were like mirrors.

Foolishly, me, the boss and the dog (who to be fair has twice as many legs as us and is 2ft from the ground) scrambled up a slippy hill, then found ourselves at the top with no way of getting down without a substantial risk of serious injury.

When you’re younger, you fall over and everybody laughs. Ha ha! The trouble is, when you reach a certain age you don’t just fall over, you “have a fall” and your foolhardy actions have consequences that more often than not land you in A&E.

Anyway, I’m about 25 years past the age of having any street cred to upkeep, so I gently slid down the hill on my backside, bemused dog in tow, until I safely reached the bottom. The dog looked at me like I’d embarrassed him in front of his friends. But with a glass arm pinned together with metal and a rickety back to protect, I couldn’t give two hoots.

This is what I don’t get when it comes to the Winter Olympics, it’s just different kinds of skidding, each one more perilous than the last.

Who, for instance, decided it would be a good idea to shoot down an ice tunnel head first at 90mph on a tea tray dressed in a giant condom and a crash helmet?

On the other hand, our 40mph land shark Walter thinks snow’s weather he can play with, leaping 6ft in the air like Denis Law in his prime to catch a lobbed snowball in his jaws. There’s a meme doing the rounds that claims Mad Max took place in 2021 and our Walt would thrive alongside a young Mel Gibson in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.