One of our retailers on this site, UK Water Features, has been in touch to tell us about a January voucher code that can be used to save on rock salt supplies.

The site sells 21.5kg carry bags of winter grit, which contain rock salt and are ideal for protecting large areas such as car parks. They promise delivery within 24 hours of purchase.

The code, which is valid until January 31st, gives five per cent off and involves no minimum spend. Enter HIGHFIVE to claim the discount.

Visit UK Waterfeatures here.

You might find you simply can’t make the journey because the roads are too bad or because public transport is disrupted – or you might be able to travel, but have children whose school has been closed, and no way of looking after them except by staying at home.

So where does that leave you, legally?

The government’s Directgov advice service has produced this useful video setting out a summary of your rights:

The basic advice is pretty much ‘talk to your employer’. There may be a company policy already in existence and, if there isn’t, you and other staff in your position may be able to agree a temporary one.

You may also find relevant information in your employment contract, staff handbook or company intranet – and, of course, if such policy exists your boss must follow it no matter how easily they themselves got into work!

Some options that bosses are allowed to consider are asking you to work at home (or make up the hours later), giving you unpaid leave or making you use some of your holiday allowance. However, there are restrictions surrounding all three.

• You can’t be forced to take unpaid leave unless your contract already allows for it. They can suggest it, but they can’t force you to accept. Of course, you might choose to agree if the alternative is losing a holiday day that you want to hang onto.
• Again, flexible working cannot be forced unless it’s already in your contract. But, again, they can suggest it and you might well want to agree.
• Using annual leave can be enforced by your boss, but if you’ll be burning your statutory holiday entitlement they have to give you twice as much notice as the length of time they want you to take. For instance, if they want to insist on everyone staying at home for a week, using annual leave, they have to give a fortnight’s notice. However, if your contact allows you more than the legal minimum holiday allowance, this extra holiday can be docked without any restriction.

All this assumes you can’t travel because of the weather. If the problem is that you suddenly have to look after a child who ought to be at school, if only it weren’t closed, then the advice gets a bit more vague.

Directgov says “you probably have the right for time off to look after them”, which isn’t hugely reassuring. It adds that your employer doesn’t have to pay you for this.

Two things to bear in mind, whatever the reason you can’t get in.

First, your boss has to treat all employees equally. It’s not legal to treat workers differently based on how far away they live, or whether they’re parents, or because they’re part time.

Secondly, if the weather causes the workplace itself to close and you can’t work from home then that’s it – you’ve got a free day off. You can’t be docked pay or annual leave if there’s nowhere for you to work.

According to William Hill, this year sees the shortest odds ever offered this near to December 25th, with a surge of betting prompted by the early freeze.

It’s offering 5/6 on Aberdeen having a white Christmas, with Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle at 11/10 and London and Liverpool priced at 6/4.

Paddy Power has London at 10/11, with most Irish locations at evens (and Lanzarote at 25/1 – good luck with that).

But all bookies agree that punters need to be sure they know what counts as a white Christmas before they decide to take the plunge and risk actual money.

William Hill spokesman Rupert Adams said: “The definition of a white Christmas is for one flake of snow to fall over the 24hr period of Christmas day, confirmed by the Met Office. So snow already on the ground does NOT count as a white Christmas for bookies.”

And Ladbrokes added: “The rules state that while a single flake is enough throughout the 24-hour period of Christmas Day, it must be snow – hail, ice pellets or soap powder will not count.”

Paddy Power operates to a slightly different set of criteria – being Irish, it doesn’t use the UK’s Met Office but instead relies on wunderground.com, the service that provides the six-day forecasts offered on this site (see below).

But it, too, insists that snow must actually come down on the day rather than lie on the ground from a previous fall, warning “1mm of snowfall must be recorded as falling between 00:00 and 23:59 on Dec 25th 2010”.

If you’re planning on having a flutter anyway, the Met Office produces a detailed and attractively-presented factsheet on the frequency of white Christmases in this country, which you can download as a PDF here.

Where home-owners might once have helped make sure their elderly neighbours had clear access from their front doors, instead they sat indoors complaining that ‘elf-n-safety’ meant they dared not risk it in case the old lady down the road fell and took them to court.

But were they right to be worried?

The answer, according to the government, is ‘not unless they did something really stupid’.

Advice issued by public service mouthpiece Directgov says: “There’s no law stopping you from clearing snow and ice on the pavement outside your home or from public spaces.

“It’s unlikely you’ll be sued or held legally responsible for any injuries on the path if you have cleared it carefully.”

What counts as ‘not carefully’? Well, the obvious one is using boiling water to melt away the snow. Yes, some people do it – and it’s a recipe for instant, invisible, potentially lethal black ice.

Apart from that, or if you leave your shovel where someone could trip over it, you should be in the clear. As far as the law’s concerned, people have a duty to make sure they take care of themselves when walking on snow and ice.

It’s not up to you to wrap them in cotton wool.

There is actually something called the ‘Snow Code’ which, like the Green Cross Code and the Countryside Code, lays down a lot of guidelines that are really, when you think about them, just simple common sense.

Here’s a summary:

The Snow Code

• Clear snow or ice early in the day, when it’s fresh and hasn’t been packed down by pedestrians. Use salt at the end of the day to prevent overnight re-freezing.
• Don’t use water, use salt. And don’t pinch it from the council’s salting bins as that’s needed for the roads. If you can’t get salt, sand or ash provide grip, though they aren’t so good at preventing re-freezing.
• Keep salt off plants and grass, as it will harm them.
• When you shovel snow, don’t block drains or other people’s paths. Create a clear snowless path straight through the middle first as a work area, then expand outwards.
• Offer to clear your neighbours’ access if they have mobility problems, and check that any who are elderly or disabled are doing OK.

Notice that last one? Explicit government advice that you should help your neighbours if they need it.

When coupled with the reassurances elsewhere about the legal position, it’s clear that the scare stories about being sued to Hell and back were just that – scare stories.

It predicts a “heavy financial toll” as the key Christmas shopping period is disrupted, entertaining becomes difficult and supply chains break down.

The insurance company was previously known as Royal Sun Alliance but, like Britain itself, waved goodbye to the sun long ago – and it says the consequences for the economy of a prolonged cold spell could be dire.

RSA director David Greaves said: “This cold front couldn’t come at a worse time for the UK. Bad weather in the run up to Christmas will have a major impact on the UK’s economy and could lead to significant losses for already struggling businesses.

“We’re due to see a rush of sales in December ahead of the VAT rise in the New Year, and many retailers are relying on these sales to see them through the traditionally quiet post-January sales period.

“If we lose just one fifth of our daily GDP through companies not being able to open and people cancelling spending plans on events and shopping we’re looking at about £1.2bn every working day.

“If the weather continues for the next two weeks, as the Met Office is predicting, this figure will quickly spiral to more than £12bn, dwarfing the hit we took in January this year.”

But there was good news for shopping websites, as RSA said predicted customers could be “forced off the high street and towards online retailers”.

It’s the second year that the insurer – previously known as Norwich Union – has sent out texts in the hope of reducing its customers’ exposure to costly disasters.

This year’s message says:

Please take care in the cold weather, if you have to drive, take a spade, food and a blanket. At home, leave the heating on to avoid burst pipes.

(You can find more of the items you should carry in your car on our winter driving page here.)

Aviva claims director Rob Townend pledged that the messages were only being sent to customers who had voluntarily supplied their mobile numbers and opted in to receiving texts from the company.

He said: “Obviously when we have such extreme weather conditions, as we have now, it makes sense to send advice to customers as quickly and simply as possible, so where we have mobile numbers for our customers – and they have said they are happy for us to contact them – we are sending little reminders to be extra careful in the cold snap.

“We hope it might prevent some of the soaking homes that we saw last winter as a result of water-damage caused by burst pipes and perhaps a short message about the driving conditions might make people think twice before they venture out in their cars.”

By coincidence, the name Aviva can mean ‘Spring’ in Hebrew (according to Wikipedia, anyway). Can’t come soon enough, we say.

Faced with a cold morning, a colder car and a tricky commute, many drivers like to check their vehicle will start in advance of needing it – and then leave the engine on to get a head-start in dealing with iced-up windows.

Quoted in today’s Independent, the AA’s Andrew Howard said: “The trouble is, there are idiots leaving their engines running to defrost the windows and warm up the car. They go back indoors to carry on getting ready while leaving the car running. The thieves know this and will walk around looking.”

But not only are thieves well aware of the opportunity this gives them, insurers are also unimpressed by this less-than-clever behaviour.

Also in The Independent, the RAC’s Vicki Burn adds: “If they turn their engines on and go indoors and the car is stolen, the insurer won’t pay out. It is not really a very clever thing to do.”

“One thing that will be new on Monday is the wind,” says BBC weather forecaster Liam Dutton. “It will be really quite strong, so significant wind chill will be an issue. Even where there isn’t new snow, what’s there already will be blown about and roads that have been cleared could be covered up again.”

Rock salt suppliers are quoted warning of impending shortages – one reports record sales, difficulties in finding supplies to import despite trying countries like Egypt and Russia, and serious problems by the end of the year.

Sky’s weather presenter Isobel Lang warns of “another exceptionally cold night” while Michael Dukes – a weatherman from wire service PA who is quoted in many places including Sky, The Sun, and The Independent – says the temperatures in some parts of the country are “ridiculously low” and like being in the middle of Scandinavia.

Still more concerned with the Cancun climate change talks, the Indy nevertheless finds space to excitedly declare “cold weather records tumbled like snowflakes at the weekend as Arctic conditions gripped Britain”.

The paper also highlights warnings from police and motoring organisations that thieves are targeting cars left with their engines running to warm up while their owners stay out of sight indoors.

The Telegraph leads with airport closures at Edinburgh and Derry before moving on to the commuter problems, and also gives a shout-out to the ubiquitous Mr Dukes.

And the Daily Mail tops the unofficial competition to roll out the most hackneyed stock phrases – in its headline and first three paragraphs it manages “mayhem Monday”, “commuter chaos”, “big freeze”, “Siberian blast”, blanketed swathes of the country and plunging mercury.

It also reports on fears from the British Trust for Ornithology and RSPB that robins and other small garden birds are being hit hard by the weather. Trust spokesman Paul Stancliffe is quoted saying: “Although we think of robins in the winter amongst the snow, they actually do badly in those conditions.”

The BBC reports that an RAF rescue helicopter in south Wales had to try four hospitals before it could find one where the snow was light enough to allow it to land with two people rescued from the Brecon Beacons.

And it quotes its weather forecaster Peter Gibbs as saying: “By Monday into Tuesday almost anywhere down the eastern side of the country could be seeing snow, possibly into the Midlands.”

For those not already sick of the snow, it has a page of photos sent in by readers – snowscapes and street scenes and nature shots that are appealing now, but will certainly have lost their sparkle this time next week.

ITN is less cautious than the Beeb – while Auntie doesn’t like to predict more than a week ahead, its independent rival boldly (and rather depressingly) says there’s weeks of freezing weather to come.

It says police in affected areas are urging people to stay indoors, a warning also passed on by Sky.

The Murdoch channel follows the BBC’s line on how long the weather will last for, saying “several more days”, and quotes the AA as saying it had dealt with 10,400 breakdowns by mid afternoon, up 80 per cent up on a normal Saturday in November.

In the newspapers, The Sun cracks open its bumper book of weather cliches, trotting out the dependable “snow chaos”, “big chill” and “Arctic blast” lines. It predicts up to “TWO WEEKS” of cold.

Not wanting to be outdone, the Mirror opts for a “TWO-MONTH big freeze“. All it can find to follow it up with, though, is a half-hearted “travel chaos” and soon it’s reduced to reporting a Tweet by footballer Robbie Savage: “Today is the day when men get ­separated from big girls blouses who will wear gloves, leggins and snoodes!!! Be a man!”

The Independent is far more interested in the Cancun climate change talks than in the weather here, while the Guardian quotes a Met Office forecaster warning “there will be few places in the British Isles that will escape”. Its AA spokesperson says breakdowns are only up 40 per cent.

Predictably, the comments section of the Daily Mail story consists of huffing and puffing about today’s winters being far easier than they were years ago, when the police weren’t so liberal and soft and didn’t tell people to stay at home. Oh – and, of course, how this proves global warming is a sham.