COVERAGE of our snow-blown week has implied criticism that some teachers have not been especially keen to jump out of bed and fight their way through drifts and along icy roads to get into school.

This has caused schools to close unnecessarily. Children have been thrown out onto the frozen streets. Parents have been inconvenienced.

But this is only partly true. In these days of global warming, where one snowstorm does make a winter, perhaps schools should be forced to close when there's a foot lying deep and crisp and even on the ground.

Instead of giving the children a piece of fruit at lunchtime, they should be sent out onto the hill with a sheet of plastic and ordered to do some lines - on a sledge up and down.

It'd raise their heartbeat and burn off a few calories. After all, just as we all know that exams are getting easier, we also know that kids are getting fatter. Many of them are clinically obese because they don't take enough exercise.

Yet the one day of the year when they all want to do some exercise outside, they're locked up inside with the heating turned on full.

THE most chilling moment of the week was not weather-related. President George W Bush ended his two-day visit to Brussels with a press conference. "This notion that the US is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous," he said.

Then he paused, as if for dramatic effect, that funny smirk playing along his lips. Finally, with a wipe of his hand in front of him as if he were dusting off a table, he added: "Having said that, all options are on the table."

MOST extraordinary trivia moment of the week came when researching something completely different and the derivation of the word 'honeymoon' popped up.

Apparently, it is an ancient Northern European custom for the bride's father to supply his new son-in-law with all the mead - honey wine - that he can drink for a whole moon (or month in lunar calendar days). It was believed the honey made the wife fertile and the husband virile.

The French - lune de miel - and the Italians - luna di miele - have phrases which, like our honeymoon, are very literal descriptions of the period after the wedding.

In his dictionary, Dr Samuel Johnson wryly observed that after a month, those honeyed feelings of love were sure to wane.

Saltburn last Sunday. The snow was sweeping in from the sea in great clouds. Foam - from the huge waves - was blowing along the beach in great clumps. The car park was empty, apart from the covering of sand washed up by the high tide, and the prom was deserted. Apart from my family.

And, also, apart from a man walking three black and white dogs, all on leads. But as he came closer, it became clear that he only had two black and white dogs. The third black and white animal was, in fact, a goat.

It wasn't a big goat. It was the sort of goat that only comes up to one's waist when one is out walking a goat.

But it was a goat. Definitely.

It had a red collar attached to a red lead, and, despite the goat-walker's promptings, it was understandably reluctant to walk to heel on such a windblasted and nithering day.

This cannot be normal behaviour, even in deepest winter in darkest Saltburn.