We're snowed in. The ancient stone city of Split and its palm-lined seafront promenade are completely white. No one's ever seen it like this before. Businesses are closed and everyone is out, throwing snowballs. They've launched a Facebook page called "Split opens the Skiing & Bathing Season 2012" with photos of locals skiing, swimming and kayaking, as fluffy snowflakes tumble into the Adriatic.

Without Warning has a brilliant location, but takes a while to make the most of it.

What to do

Makes about 20 sliders

It's a tricky task that the Australian comedian Sam Simmons has set himself – showing the lighter side of suicide. He's prepared for failure, of course, that's what brought him to the point of despair in the first place.

Robbie Williams is "terrified" of fatherhood.

Ellie, Rhiannon and Sian are in the salad days of their lives with minds as "crisp as iceberg lettuce" and organs "like the insides of ripe tomatoes".

Rules are what you look for when you first start to garden: rules about humus and hardening off, intercropping and insects, pricking out and pollination. But as you go on, you understand that garden rules exist only to be broken. Your own ability to tune in to the ebb and flow of the seasons and to notice your plants' reactions to those changes will, in the end, be much more useful than any other source of knowledge. And even then, you will still have disasters. Learn to be sanguine. There is always another spring. But it's useful to spend time this month and next thinking about the year ahead, what you might grow, how you might grow it, generally sizing up the options.