Skiing holidays can become addictive - even for people who spend their first few days falling over. Bernice Harrison, describes learning to ski in France
If there's a more demoralising holiday experience than stumbling along a snowy path in painfully heavy boots that were made for anything but walking, after a hellish first skiing lesson, then I've yet to come across it. It wasn't Émile's fault. The instructor from the École du Ski Français had had the grace to pretend that he was used to a having a hysterical woman clutching his arm for dear life. Throughout the lesson he smiled and shrugged in his Gallic way and repeatedly instructed: "Snowplough, Ber-e-nice. You must snowplough." He was telling me, incidentally, to point my skis together, not warning that heavy machinery was bearing down on us. He was so traumatised by trying to teach me that at one point he prised my hand off his arm and escaped to the magic carpet for a quick fag.
Along with the fact that Émile pronounced my name in the posh French way, the magic carpet was the only thing I liked about my first morning. It's a giant conveyor belt that takes you up the gentle slope of the training area, so you can practise skiing down before getting on to a chairlift and tackling the piste proper. That's the theory, anyway. By the end of the lesson, the group of six-year-olds who had started at the same time as me were whizzing down the slopes in their padded one-piece suits, like Teletubbies on tartrazine, while I was still stuck pretty much on the level in a state of blind terror. My feeling of failure wasn't helped by the fact that my small group of fellow holidaymakers, who had all been on skiing holidays before, had, after an hour's refresher course, disappeared over the blindingly white powdery slopes like extras in The Spy Who Loved Me.
We were in Morzine, in the French Alps, for three days' skiing, staying in a chalet in the centre of the village. It's one of those picture-postcard places in the heart of the Portes du Soleil, between Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc - one of the world's largest ski areas, with 650km (400 miles) of pistes. Above all, it is beautiful, with crisp air, pine trees, wooden chalets and the perfect ski-holiday mixture of snow-covered mountains and warm sunshine. A big attraction is its proximity to Geneva airport, so you should see snow within just over an hour of landing - torturous transfer times are a feature of some other resorts, particularly in Andorra, in the Pyrenees, and Livigno, in Italy. Practised skiers like the area because of the sheer choice of runs and because it is easy to trip along to the next town or resort area for a different day's skiing.
On day two we headed for the extraordinarily picturesque Avoriaz - after yet another dismal morning lesson in which I still managed to send the instructor home with an arm that may, even now, not be quite back in its socket - for lunch at Chez Flo, a piste-side restaurant. My companions headed up the mountain for an afternoon on the slopes; I spent a pleasant few hours drinking hot chocolate and eating cake.
Back in Morzine, our catered chalet - a style of accommodation that provides a luxurious skiing holiday - was run by a chef and a host. Alannah cooked up first-class breakfasts and dinners (serving the latter with copious amounts of local wine); Jack, our host, was also on hand as a ski guide in the afternoons, taking the more adventurous of us out on runs. Highlife, the upmarket Irish winter-sports company we went with, is very hands-on, from picking you up at the airport to organising your ski boots. (The three enthusiasts who founded it belong in one of those envy- inducing magazine articles on people who have changed careers and never looked back.) It adds up to a fantastic holiday for families: you get the benefits of a self-catering holiday - without the business of actually self-catering - in a resort that has a creche and a children's ski school.
On day three it clicked. Sometime during the lesson I fell head first into the snow - and once I discovered that a tumble wasn't going to kill me I relaxed. That was it, really - that and a third incredibly patient École du Ski Français instructor. It gave me the confidence to head out for an afternoon with the rest of the group, during which I got an idea of what I'd been missing and why people become addicted to these holidays.
We took a chairlift up to the cute and cheap Le Vaffieu, a tiny gingham-curtained restaurant at the top of a mountain that serves delicious soups and sandwiches and the almost obligatory glasses of vin chaud. Afterwards, we skied down a blue, or intermediate, run called the Belvedere, the wooden chalets of Morzine twinkling in the distance and Mont Blanc behind us - me far slower than everyone else, but skiing all the same.
Bernice Harrison travelled as a guest of Highlife Ski & Snowboard (www.highlife.ie, 01-6771100). The season starts on December 23rd and runs until April 23rd. A catered week in Morzine for January to April departures costs from €990 to €1,270 per person, including flights. Check out next week's Irish Times Magazine to be in with a chance to win a skiing holiday for two to Morzine with Highlife Ski & Snowboard