Hell may never freeze over but in Bradford it does several times a year, often in February - which is why I don't usually go visiting my Yorkshire kinsfolk till May.

Last week, however, was my uncle's funeral and saw me back in my old stomping ground, braving the raw winds fresh in from Siberia and wishing I'd had the common sense to wear a thermal vest and long johns.

You Southerners may think you know what cold is but not until you've stood wilting in the onslaught of a Pennine blizzard, your extremities pinched and blue, can you truly claim to have experienced the real thing. Then it's brrrrrrr - big time.

After four freezing days I was due to return to Brighton last Wednesday.

The weather forecast on the Tuesday evening was not encouraging. Heavy snow was expected to make its way south from the Scottish borders.

"A bit of snow - that's nowt to worry about, don't be such a wimp," said one of my hardy Northern cousins.

"It won't snow," said my aunt emphatically. "It's too cold."

At four in the morning I woke to find my nose so chilled a family of penguins would have felt at home in my nostrils.

It was very quiet outside, which is only to be expected I suppose, at four in the morning, in a house on an exposed hillside with only moorland (and an estate of bungalows) to its rear.

I peered out of the window and everything was white. Big flakes of snow were tumbling to the ground. I remembered my cousin saying: "Big flakes, little snow; little flakes, big snow."

That's all right then, I thought, this lot won't settle. I went back to sleep.

By around 7am the snow had not only settled but had been blown into substantial drifts. If a polar bear had ambled past the front door it would not have seemed out of place.

"Well, this is a surprise, we weren't expecting this, were we?" said my aunt.

"She was," said my cousin, looking in my direction.

"She's not disappointed then, is she?" my aunt replied.

"I think I'll go back to bed," I said. "No one will be going anywhere in this weather, least of all taking the coach to Brighton."

"Your bus doesn't go for another three hours - we could at least try and get the car out of the garage," said my aunt, for whom my visit had obviously long since lost its novelty value.

Merely leaving the house was a feat of endurance but standing in the driving snow trying to dig a pathway to the garage was surely sheer lunacy, I thought.

Fortunately our labours, though in vain, were also brief. After ten minutes' activity I fell over in the snow, landing on a fleshy buttock . . . mine.

Almost immediately I could feel a bruise beginning to form. Travelling was out of the question.

"No way can I sit down now for six hours," I wailed.

I finally returned to Brighton at the weekend.

"You know, I still like the North," I told my aunt before I left. "I sometimes wonder if I'll ever return to live here."

"I doubt it," said my aunt.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because living in the South's made you soft, that's why," she said.

Brrrrrrrr.