There's always a certain amount of disruption when wintry weather strikes but in Edinburgh today the buses were doing their best to get around the city and most businesses seemed to be up and running.

I was disappointed to hear that tomorrow's celebrations in St Andrew's Square had been cancelled because of the wintry weather. That seemed a bit chicken-hearted to me but apparently "The snow has damaged two of the marquees, creating a potential public safety issue, " Well I don't want to be smothered by a collapsing marquee so I suppose I'll have to let them off for acting on the better safe than sorry principle.

The airport was closed at times and given the way my bus was sliding about at 15 miles an hour on a gritted road that was probably a sensible application of the better safe than sorry principle as well.

Why were the schools closed though? In rural areas where roads may well be impassable and people live quite far from their school you can see a reason for it. Who wants to be trapped overnight in a badly heated building with hundreds of kids and an inadequate handful of teachers. If ever there was a case for better safe than sorry then that's it.

But here in the city centre? I've had a look at the catchment area map for my local primary and the furthest point from the school can't be more than half an hour's walk even in snowy conditions. So the pupils could surely have got there. Travel problems for the teachers then, who may well live much further away. That hasn't stopped hundreds of other people getting to work. So what's at issue? Snowball fights in the playground endangering pupil safety? Greater potential for accidents? Something might go wrong so better safe than sorry and too bad for the parents who had to take a day off as a result?

But if we give the schools the benefit of the doubt we surely can't do the same for my local library, also closed because of adverse weather conditions according to a notice on its door. I am truly struggling to see how the weather impacts on a library. This one doesn't even open till 1pm on a Monday, so it's not as though overnight snow hadn't been totally cleared by the time the staff needed to set out from home.

It's the sort of mystery that give public services and public servants a bad name.