I hate smug overwritten prose about being in nature, especially chilly English nature. I know a handful of people - sorry, they're "writers" - who, the minute the central heating clicks alive, start banging on about "mittened hands snuggling in deep pockets," "merry-faced youngsters" and "feet warmed by crackling fires". I hate that. It's 2003, not 19-Enid Blyton.

But today it snowed, maybe the first time in central London in over a decade, and I've got to tell you about it.

Snowy, snowy. I love the sound of that word. Someone I know had a little trembling and soon-to-be-dead pet mouse called Snowy when they were a kid. I love it when old men are called Snowy because of their hair. Snowy.

My girlfriend phoned me yesterday morning to say that it had snowed overnight. I shot out of bed and checked outside. Pah, it was only a tiny sprinkling of icing sugar that melted almost immediately. Not enough to placate grumpy old me.

This morning was another matter. I knew something good was going to happen when I saw the gritting lorries out on the roads last night. This time it was properly real.

I felt like shit, I've been sleeping badly lately, I have a headache that won't go away, I have worries along with everyone else at this time of year. But the moment I came to from my dreamworld (something about my house subsiding, huge cracks appearing before my eyes), the moment I saw the flakes coming down, I quit my internal whine and wasted no time getting out there and in it.

I made the first footprints on the A118, along which I live. I made the first almost everywhere I went. The snow was so new that it still had grip and I could really stride, I didn't have to do that scared-of-falling mince that comes later when snow melts and re-freezes again.

On Vicarage Lane I saw a man with big bouffy hair and a little cap of snow that had settled on top of it without him noticing, like a nest. I saw some bad kids with an armful of snow, going: "Just throw it inside the pub, go on!"

I walked to the park because I wanted to see a wide expanse of space covered in whiteness, and I wanted to look up and see a big sky filled with billions of tiny white snowflakes. It was heaven.

All the greys were showing, in the sky, in the strange bright-dull light the snow makes, in the silhouettes of the trees like vintage 50s twiggy graphics, and everything looked two-dimensional and felt like a landscape made of cut-outs. And I love the way that new snow plasters to one side of a tree, or settles on a branch defining the whole thing in a fresh way, like a cheap Xmas card but real.

I was so glad of my fat as I walked noiselessly along the freezing avenues of Plane trees. I saw Blackbirds that looked as though they were skimming the surface like mini hovercrafts because their specky hopping legs were hidden by the snow. The smell of toast was in the air wafting down from the bread factory at Forest Gate. The smell from that place always makes me try to imagine them making the biggest piece of toast in the world, what a cosy thought. After considering that thought for half a second I always wonder how long it would take me to recognise that smell as pollution, something that made me gag and choke instead of something good. I don't know, it's hard to trick your own nose.

It was just me and the snow until I got to the gate at the far side. One hundred boys had ready, steady, gone in their insubstantial PE kit. They all bobbed together, a sea of boy-heads. Two hundred puppy fat legs made their shorts ride up as they set off on this, the underdressed cross-country run in the snow, the most feared event in the school sports curriculum. Everyone squealed and complained about the cold, like girls they were, except for the likely lads at the back, they weren't complaining, just enduring the indignity.

I stood aside and let them swarm past me. It made me laugh, I got the schadenfreude, I felt as though I finally understood the universal vindictive cruel humour of secondary school PE teachers. But then I saw them wrapped up in head-to-toe fleece, and gloves, heads down as they jogged along, trying to avoid the hate of their charges, and I hated those jocks too for the useless life lessons they were demonstrating to impressionable minds. Next time it snows, stay indoors and play cards, okay?

I took a sharp right and walked through the flower garden so that I could be by myself again. The place was deserted and I let the thoughts wander about in my head as I mooched between the perfectly iced lawns. I remembered the last time it snowed, just a small shower that melted on impact, when my colleagues and I stood at the window of the office where I worked, and then slunk back to our desks. I compared it to now, that office long gone, where work is precarious and money never guaranteed. I thought about how lucky I am to be able to get up and go out for a walk in the snow, to be the boss of my own life, to work when I want and enjoy the landscape right now when it's at its best. I started growling a line from a Foetus song from the 80s that just appeared in my mouth: "I can do any goddamn thing I want!" I sang it over and over again until I was belting it out loudly, alone in the snow-covered rose-garden at West Ham Park: "I can do any goddamn thing I want! I can do anything! Anything!"