“There will be snow, snow, snow,” warned the weather forecaster, but she made no mention of the Borders. The best we could expect, it seemed, was sleet. All the same, it came as no surprise when the first flakes began to fall during breakfast.

This was not, as normally, eaten before daylight, when we sit illuminated at our kitchen table for all passing dog walkers to observe, like exhibits at Madame Tussauds. As a brief midwinter indulgence, we have turned off the alarm clock, and wake instead at the first signs of light. It shaves almost an hour off the day, which is either a good thing or a bad, depending on how much you have to cram in before bedtime.

Hoolet, as I may have mentioned before, is like a snow globe, a self-contained bubble of blizzard when elsewhere sunshine or rain prevail. The night before, we had decided on a morning walk in the hills, and a measly coating of white was not going to deter us.

Over the peaks there were dragging clouds, unloading spindly columns of snow, but the wind was strong enough to drive them off and it would likely be gone before we reached them. With the snow gently falling, we laced boots, pulled on ear-flapped caps and zipped up to the throat.

We were following the footsteps of a four-year-old, who had already hurried out with his mother, electrified by the prospect of freezing fun. Soon, the sun came out, and the trees began to drip. We crunched down the track, following the four-leafed clover prints of a pack of black labradors. At the stables, a couple of yearlings were being led for exercise on the treadmill, perhaps to avoid the risk of skittering on the icy roads.

Horses in the field had been fed shortly before we passed, and were nose deep in their buckets, heedless of the melted snow running off their backs.

It was as we approached the hills, after emerging from the forest, that we saw a wall of purplish cloud, filling the distant horizon and moving fast. It reminded me of a holiday we had one Easter in a cabin by the bay in Lochinver.

Standing at the window, staring out to sea, you could see snow rushing towards you, jumping like popcorn in a pan as it raced over the water, obliterating the view, and then was upon you.

We quickened. By the time we were on the hilltop, the wind was so savage I found it hard to keep my balance. A few flakes flirted around our heads. The descent was tricky, on paths of iced rubble and rock, and I kept to the heather.

Before we made it down the first wave of snow descended, washing over us and turning the bright day dark as it made its way east.

Even under the cover of the woods the snow fell hard. From the gloom, a robin appeared, perched on a holly bush. Fluffed up like a pom-pom, it flitted from branch to branch, as if waiting for us to offer a titbit.

A grey squirrel flashed across our path, twice its natural girth. When we reached Hoolet – jackets and hats crusted in white, boots toe-capped in ice – we found neighbours who had been out for a stroll making light weather of it.

After years living in the north-east, this was their natural habitat.

Whenever it arrives, winter takes me by surprise. It is perhaps my favourite season – I come from a Bavarian family, named Winter, which might explain it – and yet from one year to the next I forget how quickly it can catch you out. Even in the hills close to the village it would be possible to get into trouble if you slipped or fell.

But you don’t need to be far from home to appreciate the severity of the cold. Merely standing outdoors on Christmas morning, raising a festive glass with friends, felt like being locked in a walk-in freezer. That’s the trouble with a country like this: it looks benign and docile compared to the Alps or the Rockies, but when the weather turns, it can be brutal as well as Baltic. And, as tallies of mountaineering accidents show, too often lethal.

Those who would axe the winter fuel allowance should spend a few weeks here in January, February or March, and see how the heating bills mount.

Sir Walter Scott, who lived within a short ride of Hoolet, seemed unfazed by snow, which features often in his journal.

Although he was a compulsive walker, clocking up dozens of miles every week despite being lame and with advancing rheumatism, he also liked days when, with the land blanketed and travel or visitors out of the question, he could settle to work without interruption.

“Well,” he wrote, on January 10, 1828, when the ground was covered in snow, and guests cancelled, “I will ring for coals, mend my pen and try what can be done.”

Whether December ushers in a season you look forward to or dread, imagine how much drearier life would be if it were wiped from the calendar.

Yet a recent climatology report has suggested that this might one day happen.

By the end of the century, except in the far north of Scotland, snow in the UK could be a thing of the past. On several counts, that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Quite apart from its woeful implications for the environment, we would lose one of our essential bearings, a crucial marker of the year’s turning.

In his book Winter, Adam Gopnik describes it as an essential part of northerners’ make-up. The cold, he argues, is as crucial to our thriving as it is to seeds and plants that need a deep chill before bursting into life in springtime.

Without it, he writes, “half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys”.

Not long after we got home and changed into dry clothes, the sky cleared and the cold deepened. The hills remained white, but Hoolet looked merely as if it had been sprinkled in sugar.

One day soon, however, it will return, and ice us over like a cake.