Allison Pearson learns to cross-country ski

To be honest, I was not the most promising candidate for midlife skiing lessons. “But, darling, you’re scared of heights and you hate falling over,” Himself pointed out when I suggested we spend last February half-term in Switzerland. He had a point, but I was not going to be deterred by anything as irritating as male common sense. A friend had told me that the Grand Hotel Kronenhof in Pontresina was heaven on earth. I was emerging from a rather tenacious depression and I hoped that skiing could clear my head. I craved the grandeur and the stillness of the mountains. I wanted that silver air in my lungs. I had visions of myself as Audrey Hepburn in Charade, swathed in sable and sipping a hot chocolate in a café on the glittering slopes waiting for Cary Grant. Clearly, I felt a powerful attraction towards the après part of après-ski. All I needed now was to figure out the ski part. And not fall over. If you don’t learn to ski in your youth, every year it gets harder to take the plunge. By the time I got to university, the skiers I met were invariably black-run cowboys with stories of limbs snapped like Toblerone. I was invited to join several chalet parties in my twenties, but I didn’t fancy the idea of myself as the only adult on the nursery slopes being condescended to by five-year-olds, in French. I didn’t think about it again until I had children of my own. By the time mine were 11 and 14, they were clamouring to go on a family skiing holiday. Their plan was that scaredy-cat Mummy could tuck herself up in the hotel with a good book and a glass of glühwein while Evie, Tom and Daddy spent exhilarating days on the slopes.