Even without a chickenshit leg like mine, it takes guts to learn to ski as an adult. “I can think of better ways to spend £500 and a week’s holiday than falling on my arse in the cold whilst being rubbish at something,” huffed one friend as she booked another trip to Thailand. “I’m worried about breaking my arm on a small child,” shuddered another.

But in recent ski seasons there has been growing buzz amongst travel editors and savvy snow-junkies about cross-country (or Nordic) skiing, and my ears pricked up. For decades dismissed as the boring cousin of downhill skiing, today more resorts are offering cross-country trails, celebrities are striding stylishly through the snow clad in Moncler and Canada Goose, and sports professionals and ski instructors are touting it as a physically challenging yet low-impact alternative to downhill. A more thorough cardio workout than downhill, which lets gravity do some of the work, this relatively affordable and accessible sport also offers an alternative to jam-packed resorts, pricey lift tickets and crowded slopes; a very different experience to crowding into slush-covered lifts and dodging fellow downhill skiers like Christmas shoppers on Oxford Street. Agog at the thought of finally kick-and-gliding my way into a white, wintry wilderness, before joining the gluehwein-glugging masses and retiring to a romantic cabin like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, I book myself into my first ever ski school, Scuola Fondo in the Italian Dolomites.

Master Nordic skiing in the Italian Dolomites