I was born in Aug. 1961, so have no memory at all of 1963. This meant that for most of my life the benchmark for an epic winter was 1981-2, because I was living in W Germany at the time. Absolutely nothing I could remember from any winter of my life until then, spent in Slough, Berkshire, was comparable to that experience of a proper continental winter. The depth of cold, its longevity, the persistence of snow and the disruption to everyday life were all entirely new. And it meant that when I returned to this country, I just scoffed at every example of supposed cold weather, including those 1980s easterlies, as poor imitations of the real thing ...
... Until December 2010.
I do understand why a few people on this forum, owing to their particularly unfortunate location, won't be convinced that that they lived through one of the ultimate winter events that this country can deliver. But the fact is that if you're talking about perfect, memorable winter cold, you want it to happen in the run-up to and around the shortest day, and the effects to persist until the 25th. And this did it, to a degree no one alive had ever experienced.
Proper nationwide records, i.e. the Met Office ones, go back to 1910, and not only did 2010 boast the lowest mean December temperature, at minus 1.0 C, it utterly smashed the previous record of plus 0.1 C. And that had been set in Dec. 1981, which had hitherto been my benchmark.
I just can't have it that, from the point of view of the experience on the ground, wonderful cold weather or snow is a thing of the last century. Most of you lot have only just recently experienced a Dickensian Christmas on a scale that Dickens himself never experienced or could have imagined. (The December CET was minus 0.7 C, and only December 1890 is lower, at minus 0.8 C; Dickens was long dead by then - and there's no colder December going back to 1659).
It baffles me that some people on here simply don't appreciate that they have experienced the Holy Grail of winter, and that it happened so recently.
(For what its worth, my second-favourite winter event was also relatively recent - the West Country blizzard of Nov. 2005, because it combined the lot - surprise, earliness and proper disruption, i.e. hundreds of stranded motorists, school closures and those all-important RAF airlifts; I accept that such events may also have happened in autumns in the old days, but it was good to have it confirmed that they still happen in the here and now too.)
2 miles west of Taunton, 32 m asl, where "milder air moving in from the west" becomes SNOWMAGEDDON.
Well, two or three times a decade it does, anyway.