A puff of snow flicked up into my face as yet another pint-sized skier nonchalantly glided past where I sat struggling to untangle myself from what was the latest in a succession of ungainly falls. Somewhere further down the slope – if indeed it could be called a slope – my two young children continued to revel in their latest snowball fight.

My wife, with the patience and focus of a Buddhist monk, followed our instructor’s every command under the pretence of knowing what she was doing, before promptly falling over. To say it’d had been an inauspicious start to our attempt to learn to ski as a family would be something of an understatement.