HERE is a tale of two winter wonderlands. One is coping admirably with cold weather, the other risks being seen as a snowflake.
The first stop on our tour is the Yakutia region in Russia. Living 3000 miles east of Moscow, its population of Yakuts and Russians is more than familiar with cold snaps. On Tuesday, life carried on as normal, but schools were closed. They usually stay open as long as the temperature does not go below minus 40. This week it has been minus 67.
Our second port of call is Scotland. Here, GDP per capita is lower than in  mineral rich Yakutia, but as part of the UK it comes in at number 27 in Global Finance magazine’s list of the world’s 30 richest countries. 
In Scotland, as temperatures ranged from minus one to minus 6, traffic on the M74 at Dumfries and Galloway and Lanarkshire came to a halt due to the snow. Hundreds of travellers, including children and elderly people, were stranded overnight. At one point, mountain rescue teams were dispatched. Elsewhere in the country disruption reigned. With the cold weather expected to last until the weekend, newspapers everywhere were last night dusting off their “White hell” headlines. 
Just as predictable as those headlines is the question of how we manage to get ourselves into such a state over something as foreseeable as snow falling in winter. Other countries, Norway, Sweden and Canada to the fore, manage to keep on trucking, but in some parts of Scotland a few inches can cause havoc. This is not how it is meant to be. Scotland is not the south of England, where a drop of snow has the population running around like Chicken Licken thinking the sky is falling in. Scotland does bad weather like we do scenery and heart disease. Why, then, do we suffer the kinds of embarrassment we have seen this winter? 
Only weeks ago the icy weather was knocking pedestrians over like bowling pins. The cost of those broken bones in NHS treatment and time off work is still mounting. Fracture clinics will be seeing people for months. No-one is asking for Norway-style heated pavements, but it should not be beyond the wit and capacity of governments local and national to spread salt on walkways. 
Here, we start to inch closer to what ails Scotland in weeks like these. So far, things are not as bad as they were in the winter of 2010. Then, record low temperatures and blizzards brought transport to a halt across the country. Parts of the M8 were closed for two days. The Scottish Government, stung by criticism that it had been caught asleep at the weather monitor, eventually roused itself to action. The word “resilience” came into vogue and local and national governments put plans in place so that politicians would never again have to face the wrath of drivers. Until this week. 
It is worth noting what the then SNP Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson, told parliament during the big freeze of 2010. He began with the now traditional assertion that the weather was “exceptional”, before adding: “The fact of the matter is, that when the transport system grinds to a halt and people are forced to spend the night in their cars, then something has clearly gone wrong.” What was true in 2010 is true today. 
What, then, is going wrong? Let us call it a matter of the three Rs: responsibility, resources and readiness. First, responsibility. Delicate one this, but essential. Weather like this must be taken seriously. It is not just a pain in the backside to be caught out, it can be a matter of life, death, or serious injury. Yet too many people are still failing to heed advice not to travel unless the journey is absolutely necessary. Have we become so selfish that we believe most things we do fall into that category? 
Many of the problems on the M74 on Tuesday were caused by jackknifed lorries. Should they have been banned from the road, or the road itself closed? That would have critics up in arms over the damage to the economy, but working hours have already been lost by drivers going nowhere, then restarting their journeys tired (thus increasing the risk to everyone). One idea might be to direct HGVs off the key routes and into car parks till it is safe to go on. 
Motorists in general do not seem to know how to drive in bad weather, going too fast and not leaving enough braking distance. But how many of us can remember being told how to handle snow when we were learning to drive? 
Responsibility leads us to the second R, readiness. It is a good joke that weather forecasters were invented to make economists look reliable, but it is out of date. Courtesy of a sea of satellites “up there” we know more about the weather “down here” than we have ever done. The BBC Weather app can tell you hour by hour what the weather will be doing. Weather bulletins get more time on the news than refugee crises. There is little excuse not to be ready. That is why, unlike in 2010, gritting trucks and snow ploughs were out in reasonable numbers before Tuesday, though some could not get through on the night due to cars abandoned on the hard shoulder. See R for responsibility, above. 
If we accept that some people need to travel, and they do all they can to prepare, it then becomes the responsibility of the authorities to get them there as safely as possible, which leads us to resources. As The Herald reported yesterday, five councils are set to bust their winter maintenance budgets and we are only in the third week of January. If the weather carries on like this, money will have to be found from elsewhere to keep the roads open. Labour says councils are facing cuts of £700 million this year, the Scottish Government says the funding settlement is “fair”. Who is right? Expect this argument to intensify as the Scottish Government attempts to get its Budget through. It was notable yesterday that the Transport Minister, Humza Yousaf, said he was “open to a conversation” with councils over whether they required extra money for winter maintenance. Now there is a gap in the political weather to watch closely. 
In the meantime, Scotland, as they used to say on Hill Street Blues, let’s be careful out there.