So you thought minus 3C was cold. Spare a thought for the good people of Ukraine, the land of my grandfather. Minus 3C is positively balmy at this time of year. Try minus 30C instead. If they do actually drink alcohol for breakfast, as myth has it, you can probably sympathise why. I'm surprised they don't drink something stronger.

Britain, you don't know you're born. Not only does Ukraine boast winter temperatures that make Scandinavia seem like the Costa del Sol, their summers put most of Europe in the shade. Try 40C, the kind of mercury-bursting reading that Las Vegas – a city in the desert, folks – might record.

So, yes. We don't have it so bad. The problem is we are under-prepared. The Government has a name for how we cope at this time of year. Winter resilience they call it, which sounds deeply impressive. In reality, it amounts to a few piles of salt. In a particularly cold year, the piles might be slightly larger. It's a ministerial responsibility even I could cope with, and I say that as someone who struggles to run a bath.

Which is fine. Households in Canada possess snow chains as a matter of course. Cars wouldn't be able to move otherwise. Instead, we have ageing tartan rugs, placed strategically on the wind screen the night before to mitigate against frost. It seems to me like a completely proportionate response.

Most conversations this week have revolved around the weather. Most have been grave in tone. I blame forecasters deploying the phrase "Siberian blast" without considering the unintended consequences.

Yet as excited as we get about weather extremes, they are few and far between. And seldom very extreme. Tornadoes, hurricanes, monsoons. Most Brits have only seen these things on television screens. Our default setting is drizzle – not rain, drizzle – and variations of that. Namely drizzling or about to drizzle.

There is a song about witnessing four seasons in one day. It's by the band Crowded House, who hail from New Zealand. I assume, therefore, that this is common on the other side of the planet. Things are very different on our tiny tract of this spinning rock. For most of my life I don't think I've seen four seasons in one year, let alone a day.

Maybe we have three settings. Bullet grey skies, then there's that one week in August where the country squeezes on to a beach in Brighton, and the third is more parky than usual. Which is where we are now. I imagine we're regularly the "and finally..." comedy news in Ukraine.

Curious, I wondered how my Ukrainian cousins, uncles and aunties were coping. Surely the post-Soviet Union news websites would be groaning under the weight of cheery snow pictures. That's what we do in the West. In truth, there were few laughs.

The Associated Press had this: "Ukrainian authorities have recorded 38 more deaths due to a severe cold spell, bringing the total over the past week to 101.

"The Emergency Situations Ministry said on its website Friday that more than 1,200 other people have been hospitalised with hypothermia and frostbite as temperatures in some parts of the country sank to minus 32C."

On the internet, amateur footage of a cup of boiling water being thrown out of a window and freezing on contact with air – dubbed an "ice bomb" – was something of a sensation.

By contrast, it makes our year-round plight seem rather trivial. From the "ooh, what a scorcher" summer headline staple or the lightest dusting of snow, oft described as "blizzard" conditions, bringing London to a standstill, we seem not to have the stomach for it.

And so it is. The Birmingham Mail's website noted: "Europe freeze is cold comfort in shivvering (sic) Brrrrr-um!" I'm not quite sure what was so brutal in our second city, but I suspect there were few, if any, "ice bombs" in the air.

And yet, knowing this, British weather will doubtless remain a source of unflinching fascination. It was ever thus.

Samuel Johnson once said: "It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm." That was in 1758. It could have been 2012.