Last week’s snow brought some criticism of the authorities about cancelling schools and shutting government services at noon.

The keyboard warriors seemed as one in condemning the decisions.

But those decisions were made after a very plain weather forecast.

There would be snow after 12pm. And there was.

Perhaps it fell a little later in some areas than had originally been predicted but it’s never a precise science.

Had schools opened only in the morning and the freezing temperatures and snow fell, there would have been road chaos. Children might not have been able to get home.

It’s always easy to be wise after the event. Imagine the uproar if the forecast hadn’t been heeded, the snow fell and people were stranded.

While, as usual, the profile of public sector closures was higher, plenty of private sector companies changed the way they worked too.

Now that white-collar workers have learned how to work from home after the pandemic, it’s much easier to carry on with business as usual for lots of companies.

Our reporters who live outside Douglas were able to do this, for example.

It’s impossible to do manual work from home, of course. But the weather for outdoors work at least meant that was unlikely to be carried out anyway.

Meanwhile, the Mountain Road was closed earlier than perhaps it needed to be.

We can see the logic. No cars on that road means no accidents, means no need for the emergency services to scramble to get there.

Motorists often over-estimate their own driving skills, as we see so often.

So the decisions over the snow days were taken with the best of intentions and were right with the information available.