Well, not really. It's actually just a slightly late blog because I was tied up trying to finish off the two stories I managed to dig out of Tuesday's planning meeting.

Necessary and important though they may be, planning meetings are, not to put too fine a point on it, horribly dull. The greater part of such meetings is usually taken up with arguing over the minutiae of planning applications and while I understand why this is - it would be stupid to let applications go through without making sure they were completely viable - taking it all down in shorthand is somewhat difficult.

Still, two stories are not to be sneezed at and at least one of them seemed quite significant in that permission has been granted for a fairly substantial development to go ahead in Higham Hill. But enough about planning.

On a slightly more bewildered and less grumbling note, I must confess I don't understand human beings sometimes.

What on earth, for example, could have possessed anyone in their right mind to walk out on the ice on Hollow Pond, Leytonstone?

Granted, the weather has been particularly chilly (to say the least) lately but not so much so that the ice would actually be particularly thick, meaning walking on it would be...well, thick.

To be fair, some people had good intentions - for example, one man going in to rescue a dog from the freezing water and another setting out to try and help the struggling ducks - but what about that couple with the toddler?! What possible logical reason could they have had for taking the poor child out onto the pond?

There does seem to be a kind of winter madness going around, from what I can gather after reading the national papers. A few years ago, snow and ice wouldn't have seemed particularly out of the ordinary for late December and early January, but now, the cold weather seems to have sent people a bit dotty.

There are wintry photo galleries all over the internet as though snow were a freak spectacle, never before witnessed in Britain. It wasn't so very long ago that snow was expected, even welcomed in winter, but now it seems to bring the whole country to a standstill.

That's climate change for you, I suppose...