We pose the question in this week’s online poll: “Should Oxfordshire County Council set aside more resources to clear the roads when it snows heavily?”

Inevitably, the state of the roads is the biggest topic of conversation when we have snowfall as we had last Saturday.

Snow of such magnitude is a rare event. This was the second heavy fall of 2010 — the first being in the early part of the year — but you have to look back a long way again for another event of such magnitude in the last two decades.

Not only did we get a lot of snow in a very short time, temperatures were also very low, allowing the snow to become compacted and negating the effect of grit.

It took until Tuesday for most of the main routes in Oxfordshire to get to a state where traffic could progress relatively ice-free.

Could the county council have done better? We suspect it may have been taken a little by surprise. Forecasts in the run-up to Saturday seemed to change by the hour. Indeed, the latest forecasts seemed optimistic that we would miss the snow.

As it happened, Oxfordshire was one of the worst affected areas in the south.

The council gritting crews were faced with a difficult and thankless job. It is not a job many of us would choose to do and we pay tribute to the efforts made on our behalf.

It all goes to highlight the unpredictability of our weather. We can go a decade without significant snow and then we get two major falls in less than 12 months.

The fickleness of our weather is a strong argument for the county council being better prepared for all eventualities — that means more gritters and ploughs and more grit. As ever, the cost has to be balanced against the benefit.

How many of us invest in winter tyres, snow chains or snow socks? If we do not do that ourselves because we are happy to endure the inconvenience on the rare occasions that it does snow, should we expect our local authorities to invest more in gritters and snow ploughs?

We do not propose to answer the question ourselves. The only thing we would say is that, as a newspaper continually chasing a deadline, we at Newspaper House can never allow anything to halt our activities.

Through snow or floods our staff have always shown that you need not be beaten by the weather.

It only remains for us to wish you, our readers and advertisers, a very happy (and white) Christmas.