I have no idea when it happened but at some point in the last 12 months I underwent a definite transformation and have emerged in January 2003, a Big Softy.

Well, that's what The Mother calls me ever since I refused to pop down to the local Co-op for some milk for her coffee early on Saturday morning.

"I'm not going out there - it's snowing!" I said.

"So?" said The Mother. "Why should that prevent you walking 200 yards down the road? Haven't you seen the newspapers? Young men have been walking across Antarctica and making less fuss about it."

"Silly young men do all sorts of things that sensible middle-aged women - and middle-aged men - wouldn't contemplate doing," I told her.

"If you're going to be such a Big Softy I'll go myself," said The Mother.

"It's only a bit of snow after all."

"Only a bit of snow?" I said. "I thought you read the papers? Six inches of the stuff fell in Sussex last night."

"That may be but it didn't fall outside our front door, there's barely half an inch on the pavement," said The Mother, putting on her coat.

"No!" I said, grabbing her arm. "You can't possibly go out there, it's far too dangerous."

I had visions of little old ladies, all resembling The Mother, lying outside the Co-op with fractured femurs and tibias and horrendously bruised backsides.

"All right, I'll go," I said. "I don't see why you can't drink powdered milk but I'll go - once I've found my woolly hat and snow boots. I'm not going anywhere without proper clothing."

The Mother sighed. "Then you'd better not forget the dog sled and emergency rations in case you get lost," she said.

"Do you realise you've hardly been out once since the New Year?" she added.

"First it was the rain, now it's a few flakes of snow keeping you indoors. When did you become such a wimp? Have you forgotten you're a Northerner?"

Ouch! That was the gauntlet well and truly thrown down. Forgotten I was a Northerner?

How could I? I, who as a slip of a girl in Yorkshire used to walk five miles to school and back through blizzards and snowdrifts? (If this were a Catherine Cookson novel I'd have been wearing clogs and frostbite rather than Clarks boots and M&S socks).

And who was it used to stand on a ladder and break off icicles hanging from the porch at her grandparents' home? (If this were a CC novel I'd have done it with my bare, chilblained hands, but in fact I always wore sheepskin mittens).

Yet, if I was honest, I had to admit that I had become something of a Big Softy in recent times.

Why? I wondered. Could it be because I'm no longer a fully paid up member of the rat race?

Working from home I sit warm and cocooned in my bedroom, watching the elements through the window. I no longer have to queue in the rain for buses or stand on station platforms in howling gales.

Or perhaps I've become soft as I've grown older? There are many things - not all of them printable - that I did in my 20s that I couldn't imagine doing now (and sometimes wonder how I did then!)

Or was The Mother trying to tell me something? Something so devastating she hardly dare say the words?

Could it be that I had changed, that after 30 years of living in Sussex I thought and behaved like ...?

"A Southerner, yes, that's what you've become!" she said.