Are we teaching our children to give up and go home at the first sign of bad weather? What a wonderful life lesson for them. Or perhaps it's the litigation culture that we now seem to live in that rules!

I thought that yesterday when the kids were playing out in the snow outside my house (not my kids, the neighbours'). These weren't the little kids, but teenagers, who spent most of the day throwing snowballs at each other (and incidentally distracting me from my work, as the occasional one hit my window). If they were able to do that, I would have thought they'd be able to go to school.

But as others have said, I suspect the litigation culture you mention is to blame. If a kid should slip over on a snowy school playground, imagine what the parents would do to the school.

Now in my day, we used to be sent out to play football (soccer, to US readers) in blizzard conditions. And we weren't allowed to wear any extra layers of clothing, just our usual shorts and shirts. When we cam back in it would take us half an hour to thaw out before we could get changed back into our normal clothes. And I'm not exaggerating a la Python's Yorkshiremen sketch, either - it's all true.

It was character forming I tell you!