I walked to Canterbury today, to make the most of the snow and its hated enemy, the sun. A lot of my life is staring at slightly differently sized rectangles of light. I sleep surrounded by them, and I spent my days pressing bits of them with my thumbs.

I’m sure this is a lifestyle a lot of us are familiar with at the moment.

I set out with no particular direction or destination in mind, but with a dim sensation that my day would be a failure unless I could stomp across a field of virgin snow. This I achieved by heading through the yard of St Martin’s church in Herne, following a footpath which eventually opened up into the field I had been tingling about.

I also met a horse.

The horse was guarded by a do not feed the horse sign, but clearly someone with a handy hay supply had ignored it. And that’s the problem with signs: some people see themselves above them.

One regular whinge from this rambler, repeated in many a furious blogpost, is how easy it is to feel hemmed in on public footpaths, which are often narrow paths surrounded by barbed wire to stop Johnny Public from meandering out into private land, a concept we all know is very important to us capitalists. Snow makes it much easier to lose one’s path, leading to a freedom usually limited to walks on the downs, the moors, or in the mountains.