On the slippery slope...

Skiing, for all its popularity, strikes right-thinking folk as a perverse pastime.

Unlike your normal holiday - sea, palms, Jilly Cooper and G&T - the ski break promises a week of frostbite and one-piece outfits in shades that shrivel retinas. Show me a good skier and I'll show you a school saddo who preferred Sports Club to Toast Toppers and Magpie.

Yet, as decades advance and one expands into flaccid waistbands, it is hard not to envy smugsters who bothered in youth to get an activity under their belt, rather than a Hovercraft-cushion-full of Heineken.

Consider the vision that is the skier back from the slopes: fuelled on pizza and reservoirs of Rioja, yet fresh as a daisy and just as slender. My working life too manic to permit both the gym and a lie-in, I wondered if the odd skiing holiday might solve things. At nearly 40, though, was I too uncool for school?

Not in Andorra, the tax-free principality in the Pyrenees, powered by a high-altitude-Bentalls of a capital, Andorra La Vella. Salesgirls lurk at every turn, out to stun the unwary with a bottle of Thierry Mugler.

Affordable Andorra (200 Marlboro: £8.50) is Learner Central - 4,200 are among the 6,000 Brit arrivals bussed to its resorts weekly from Barcelona and Toulouse airports. Good terrain, easy progress from nursery slopes to mountains - if anywhere could whittle me into shape for Selfridges' summer rails, it was here.

Whenever I now smell rum 'n' Coke with Cointreau chasers I am spirited back to Soldeu, a ribbon of woodentop lodgings amid mighty white mountains: home to cheery pizzerias and bars like Fat Albert's - with hindsight, not the most sensible place for a first night before school.

Monday, 9am: equipped with a hangover, hired skis and boots that would shortly have me walking like Hattie Jacques in Manolos, I boarded the gondola for the resort. Soldeu El Tarter reverberated to Simply Red as pupils flocked hither and thither, bleating for Miss.

That first morning, I took to skiing, despite fiendish challenges devised to sort potential Franz Klammers from obvious Eddie the Eagles. "Put your skis on"; "Take them off"; Put them on"; "Stand in a circle"; "Move to the left"; "No, the left ..."

Triumphing in the Nursery Slope Test, I met my classmates: fortysomething Mags and Bert, from Manchester, both handsome in purple; Darren from Ireland, who liked Red Bull; Chris, who looked six, but could "manage half a cider" of an evening; Sean, the fast learner; plus Guy, a maroon-clad secure-unit worker from Bristol. And teacher Katy - she of the rallying cry: "Get up, you old woman."

Skiing is technique. By Tuesday, battling blizzards of frozen Ajax, we had our heads, if not our limbs, round the snowplough and the downhill ski (if you only master one, make it the snowplough - it's the brake). Forming a dithery Dayglo crocodile, we learned that pistes are not tackled in Frank Spencer-style plummets but giant zig-zags. You need to load all your weight on your downhill ski or, for reasons only Stephen Hawking will understand, the skis take control, forcing you into a compromising position with a fir. To recap: lean sideways down that slope as you weave, an impulse as natural as boiling your toes.

We advanced to green slopes. As I lay in another of my traffic-stopping star-patterns, Katy diagnosed: "You're better turning one way than the other" - something I've known since I was 14. Still, after a lunch of lasagne and Mick Hucknall, I twice retraced the descent to the village. All was tickety-boo until I mounted an Irishman floundering in a snowbank. He claimed he was a "green" virgin - a likely story. When I suggested a compensatory pint in town I couldn't see him for dust.

I clicked better with Annie, who befriended me on a chairlift: "The first week is the best," she said, "though you're knackered cos your body is doing the work rather than your skis." As we swung upwards, new best friends above a wilderness of sugar-dusted pines, I began to enjoy skiing's social side - imagine talking technique with a stranger on a Mauritian sunlounger.

Black Wednesday: The Day of the Dreaded Drag Lift. We were bound for the summit, Tossal de la Llosada. Not for vertigo sufferers, it first meant a chairlift from the resort to a halfway house some 50,000 light years above Soldeu. Next: the drag lift to the top. A drag lift is like a long line of big shirt buttons dangling from wires - the sort of thing Faye Dunaway would cling on to in a disaster movie. Pop the button behind your buttocks and let the lift drag you. At least, that's the idea.

Ant-like figures rose beyond the field of human vision. Mags and Bert were so small that you could no longer tell they were in purple for the third day running. "I wanna go down," cried a wetty-pants.

"You can't go down," retorted Katy. "Get on. Positive thinking." Short of a handy precipice to push her over, I mounted, shut my eyes and intoned "positive thinking" to the top. "See," she trilled. "You never know you can do it until you try ..." before urging relegation to a lower class.

Every humiliation has a silver lining. Had I not failed with Katy I'd never have met honey-voiced Irishman Henry, my new instructor. He specialised less in techniques than epiphanies. Rather like the maths teacher who made me laugh all the way to a CSE grade one when O-level had me in tears for about two years.

Henry had the knack of making the abstract graphic. For example: "Imagine you've got a 1,000-peseta note clenched between your buttocks while stubbing a cigarette with the ball of your foot." And by Friday, between the group's mumsy coffeeand-cake breaks, I was doing just that. Most people call it skiing.

"Go on, use your balls," Henry yelled as, slowly but surely, I conquered another blue run, shimmying myself slimmer, to the bemusement of serious skiers gliding by.

Way to go

For one-week's learn-to-ski in Andorra (half-board with flights, unless stated), try: Ski Thomson (0870 6061470) from £221pp B&B; Inghams (020 8780 4433) from £234 pp; Ski Pavilion (0870 241 0427) from £329pp. Further information from Ski Andorra (00 37 686 4389; www.skiandorra.ad).