SNOW, LIKE salmonella, chocolate-covered ants and most music since Doris Day, should be banned as offensive to one or more of the human senses. Or at the very least, each and every flake should be labeled: "Look, But Do Not Touch."

Don't get me wrong - I'm just as schmaltz-prone as the next guy, getting misty-eyed and all that when the Cool Yule/Happy New Year's cards arrive with scenes of snow-covered villages and Crosby croons, "I'm dreamin' of a white Christmas. . ."

The reality sets in when you run out of toilet paper and your path to the nearest store is blocked by snow that starts about six inches above your front doorknob and runs to somewhere near the fringes of the known universe, and the snow removal teams won't be here for another three days.

The basic truth about snow is that it's great stuff as long as it is where you are not and are not likely to be. It is cute and pleasing to the eye, and soothing to the psyche as it evokes memories of wood fires and roasted marshmallows, even though 98.3 percent of us never once actually got anywhere near them.

Snow becomes evil stuff when you have to touch it, or dig the newspaper out from under seven inches of it, or stomp through hillocks of it to get to your car to start it, only to find out too late that you forgot to put in the anti-freeze and you now have a cracked radiator.

It is the Jekyll/Hyde nature of snow that makes it so infuriating. It looks as pure as, well, the driven snow, but underneath the blanket it is a diabolical substance, ranking right up there with broccoli, Eminem and time-share apartments in the Devil's own toolkit.

Long before I ever landed in London, I dreamt of Dickensian Christmases, of church spires and smoking chimneys poking through layers of white covering the palaces and neo-Gothic ministers and Georgian homes, and carols rising from families clustered around pianos and roaring fires. There was even a pig roasting on a spit in one.

Then, a year or so after I arrived, a friend and I found ourselves on Christmas Eve in Trafalgar Square, singing carols beneath the huge, decorated tree that is Norway's annual gift to London for Britain's help during the Late Unpleasantness with Germany.

And it started to snow. By this time we had determined to walk to Westminster Abbey for the midnight service in that 900-year-old haunt. As we strolled the half-mile down Whitehall, the snowfall built up, and by the time we arrived at the Abbey, it was a vision sparkling in the flakes swirling through the floodlight beams.

The snow seemed heaven-sent. The fact that it also possessed a diabolical streak became evident an hour or so later, when we sought to get a taxi for the seven-mile ride home. The snow's partner in evil were the cabbies who, on Christmas Eve alone, are allowed to sell their services to the highest bidder.

"How much?" I asked, after stating our destination. No reply. I made an offer. Still no reply. And another. . . We finally got home, or near enough to it (the driver refused to drive across the bridge), by paying 400 percent of the normal rate. We wished the cabbie something, but it wasn't "Merry Christmas."

That episode reinforced my love/hate relationship that began - or at least the hate part of it did - in my days toting the News-Sentinel newspaper to 50 or so snowbound homes along Sharp's Ridge, in north Knoxville. That's when I decided that writing for newspapers (indoors) was better than delivering them (outdoors).

Since that evening trudging out of Westminster Abbey, I haven't really been much bothered by snow. It may come as a surprise, but nowadays London doesn't get a lot of the white stuff in December, and Christmases are generally soggy affairs under leaden skies and getting poked in the eye with umbrellas wielded by five-foot females.

Now fast-forward to about three days ago, to a small village in England's Midlands, where you will find myself and wife Elizabeth and cats Ali Magraw, Teddy Bear and Currant Bun learning a few home truths about rural life.

One of the first rules is that the instant on a winter's day that you have scooped the last teaspoonful of mayonnaise from the jar, snow arrives by the megaton, and you find yourself locked in for the next 72 hours, condemned to eating mayo-less sandwiches.

From inside our cottage looking out, a picturesque scene of white stretches as far as the eye can see, begging for us to haul out the camera and take scores of photos that will be glanced at once, then deposited atop the pile that is supposed to become a family photo album but somehow never quite makes it.

If, that is, the pictures ever get developed. For somewhere out there in the white wilderness is a car - our old Ford - buried up to its carburetor in stuff that alternates between a sickly, gray mush and an Alaska glacier, depending upon how close to the Antarctic the temperature sinks.

The nearest photo shop is four miles away, as more importantly are the nearest food shops. They might as well be in downtown Vladivostok. At least people on the Russian steppes have dogs and sleds and such to get them to the local borscht and blini emporiums, don't they?

Meanwhile, here we sit, locked in by the elements, in the heart of the land of the fourth largest economy in the world. A few hours ago, the sun - a round thing in the sky - peeked out, and it looked for a bit as if we might be able to cut a path to the car and make a provisions run before dusk.

But now the radio advises that gale-force winds, sleet and, yes, more snow are on the way within a couple of hours, and I am hauling indoors more coal and wood from supplies that are growing ominously low. I hope to see the car again someday. . .

Ah, well, time to light a roaring fire, pile a few cats on the lap and get something to drink and eat. A few sandwiches will do. And, oh, you can hold the mayo.

Thought for the Week: It's true that the first minute of life is dangerous, but the last minute is a bit dodgy, too.

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