Is fog the new snow? There used to be a scarcity value to fog of the sort that now attaches to snow. “Freezing fog” (along with the even more dreaded, verging-on-the-supernatural “black ice”) was the great terror of Seventies motoring, spoken of in the fearful, hushed tones adults also then reserved for The Exorcist, or Carlos the Jackal. Fog, of any temperature, wasn't something that happened very often.

Yet this winter, as the climate gets ever tamer, it's been foggy more often than not, often all day. I haven't seen the pyramid on Canary Wharf or the dome of St Paul's since new year. Weeks pass with enough grey stuff hanging over the capital to inspire a Stoker, a Conan Doyle, an Eliot, a Monet, a Turner even. It's only a matter of time before cabbies start making reference to peasoupers and men in capes start throwing very long shadows up walls.

Snow, meanwhile, is a commodity as rare as Christmas. Having grown up on a fair bit of sledging plus a guaranteed day or two off school, I feel cheated. Another February is three quarters gone and not a flake of snow has landed in the city, or anywhere else I know of in the South East. A majority of the English probably won't witness any snow in our own country this winter. My children, 10 and 8, have seen snow from their own windows fewer than half a dozen times.

Clearly the challenge is to make fog as melodramatic as snow. But it's a struggle. “Look children!” I shout, pulling up the kitchen blind at 8am, “it's fogged again in the night! A magical fogfall of virgin fog, draping the drab cityscape in a low-lying light grey cloud, reducing visibility quite remarkably! Let's get our hats and scarves on and go and, er, sneak up on someone!”

They aren't interested. And who can blame them? It's not as if you can (or would want to) dash into the park to build a fogman or lose an impromptu fogball fight to the local rough boys on the way to school. An airport can be fogged in, but a home? Not without cloaking reality in a shroud of untruth. Fog just doesn't lend itself to mythologising. Fog White and the Seven Dwarfs? I don't think so.

Back in the Seventies again, when I watched too much Blue Peter, there are two pieces of information burned in my memory (or three if you count the fact that Lesley Judd was strangely fanciable). One (and Valerie Singleton was always especially moved by this paradox, she seemed to mention it every week) is that the Spanish Riding School is actually in Vienna.

And the second is that in the 17th century the Thames froze so solid that traders set up stalls on the ice. So I confidently expected that when I grew up, for at least part of the year I'd be able to cross London's river without benefit of bridge or boat, buying a nice lamprey sandwich on the way. And yet it turns out the best I can hope for is that the opposite bank is slightly blurry around the edges. Somehow this does not carry the same cachet.

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