A few things have made me notice this, this year. First of all there was the snow. Just after the New Year celebrations… I was away for a few days, in a rather lovely hotel not far from Belfast, and on the Thursday evening, the obligatory trips to IKEA and the sales complete, I arrived back there amid the earliest snowflakes. Gradually it grew colder and quieter outside my window, until the constant, distant noise I'd noticed the previous night from the busy road outside became muffled down to a near silence, broken only by the occasional gentle, slow swishing of tyres edging their way though the slushy track-marks replacing the confident lane-markings. As the surrounding tall, evergreen trees became weighed down with the heaviness of the fallen snow, the sounds around us became muffled, until the least sound outside the window turned shocking – startling – frightening. Looking out at midnight, I found that the snow had stopped falling: the blackness of the sky was set against its own direct opposite, as the pure white of the new snow glowed iridescent in the darkness. Next morning, when I looked, the purity had been marked by footprints. In the same way, the wondering about how much snow would fall was resolved into a certainty now, into the practicalities of driving and surviving and getting home. As we travelled north through the snow, the trees weighed down and the fields like the top of a Christmas cake, there was silence in the car as we let ourselves become lost to the soundlessness around us… breaking only now and then with the whispering flakes on the windscreen, the sighing sweep of the freezing wiper blades.

I noticed it again a fortnight later, when a violent January storm led to a power cut: not, though, on the night of the storm itself, but two nights later, on a night of fog and frost. It seemed odd that it was on this still night that a powerline came down, not two nights earlier when neighbours had lost roof tiles and the wheelie-bins of the local suburbs seemed as though they were preparing themselves to roam around the streets like an invasion of Doctor Who-style daleks. In my darkening teatime kitchen I could hear nothing beyond the almost imperceptible flickering of the candles I had lit. It was almost frightening: a realisation of how much noise we usually swathe ourselves in, a protective blanket of noise against the silence of meaningless emptiness. No TV. No stereo. No radio. No cordless phone. No fridge hum, no heating boiler, no kettle, no microwave, no extractor fan… no washing machine, and none of the quirky crashes and groans that we've got used to hearing from our rather elderly dishwasher. Hours passed. Outside, the silence was an even more impenetrable barrier. Neighbours' houses were in darkness – in some front rooms there was a glow of a fire or a candle, while other families had abandoned their homes for the evening. With no streetlights, the stars had never seemed so clear; pinpricks of patterned perfection in the black silence. The silence, the darkness and the cold: it was like waking up after a hundred years asleep and discovering that everyone else had died, or gone away; that the world had ended and I had somehow survived. Running out of battery power in my torch, or the candle burning down before I had time to remember where I'd left the matches – the tiny possible disasters of that night stay with me alongside the relief of the moment when the power came back on, and I could fill the house with light and warmth and sound again.

Winter silences happen too when a friendship drifts away. When the friend with whom you loved sharing your amusement or your sadness or those words you just overheard someone saying, just somehow loses touch. The person you still remember telling things to, and who told the same kind of things to you. Things from the exciting new idea to the silly little mundane detail or the comment on the weather or the thoughtful puzzlement about what life's really about, late at night now and then. It goes on for so long. You think it's secure. You think the words and the e-mails and the texts and the times you've helped each other out have archived themselves into a friendship. That there's trust. And then suddenly – and you don't know what you've done wrong – the contact just ends. It's as sudden and as irreversible as the clocks being set back an hour in autumn. Fall back. You don't like it. It's darker – colder – for longer. And it seems beyond what you can do anything about, and beyond anything you can understand. The silence overwhelms you like the dark coldness of a powercut or a midwinter snowstorm. It makes you shiver. It reduces what you'd seen as a safe road ahead to tyre tracks in a treacherous blankness. The silence snowblinds you. Your feet slide beneath you as you doubt yourself again. What did you do wrong? What placing of your feet – what breaking of the silences – what is it about you that has changed you from trusted, sought-out friend to this blanked out name, this sound forgotten when the power-lines fell? The winter of snow and silences will pass, of course. With a forecast of snow today, I can still look at my garden and see the birds and the daffodil shoots and know that the spring will come and the snow will melt. But when a winter silence muffles over a friendship, it's hard to trust to spring or summer if the silence one day melts. Because you know that winter and wordless hurt can, and will, return. That you can't risk the hurt and the coldness and the silences again.

And it's like that with writing too. The months of silences will come. The months when there's just nothing left to say. When things go on happening but the days are just too dark, too cold, and you somehow can't find words that flow to an encapsulation of a thought. Your feelings and your observations seem to freeze on contact with reality: an icy screen of winter and passing time and growing old. Your inspiration freezes into a white cloud of frozen breath, which dissipates before the thought grows old. You try to write, but all you hear is the rhythmic punctuation of the keys flying down as you type. You're doubting yourself again as you try to think aloud; your words seem to echo in hollow emptiness against the starry black silence which surrounds you. You feel yourself turn cold. Anything you write, you think, you say – it's all so insignificant and transient; such an insubstantial barrier against your own insignificance in a landscape of wordless, white, treacherous perfection.

The meanings we construct in what we write, or think, or do, are like the snowman children build on those days when snow brings magic to their gardens. When the rain returns and the snow melts, there's that moment when the shrinking snowmen are all that's left to remind us of the silent iciness – standing like diminishing sentrymen in the gardens of the suburbs and the towns. But eventually these white guardsmen will go too. Eventually even the truest words and the deepest bonds will fall to silences. And that cold, wordless landscape is an overwhelming one. The words of meaning and the words of friendship are the only defence we have against it; knowing they'll be overwhelmed in silence too, though, makes finding these words and having the confidence to formulate a thought so difficult in a wintry landscape, reaching as far as the stars.