I first tried to ski at 21. I was living in Paris and a gung-ho French friend took over his parents' flat in the then new ski resort of Avoriaz. After a morning's fooling around on the nursery slopes, teaching myself and not learning how to turn or even stop, I was dragged to the top of a mountain in a blizzard, given two glasses of glühwein and left to get down.

Many freezing hours later, exhausted, scared and having been cursed by everyone on the slopes, I remember thinking that skiing wasn't that easy, or fun.

Anyway, Avoriaz appalled me. The French middle classes - cold and self-regarding in the early 1970s - were grim. Skiing, I decided, was an elite, expensive and dangerous sport for the rude and stupid who treated beginners, and the English in particular, like slush. For 30-odd years, I took simple winter pleasures on Welsh hillsides, or in faraway sunshine. The Alps in winter? Keep them.

And then, three years ago, I went with girlfriend/ski instructor Jenny to a cheerful little hotel called La Belle Etoile right on the nursery slopes at St Gervais-le-Bettex in the Chamonix valley. It was opposite the great Mont Blanc massif which glowed pink and red in the afternoon, but the experience was awful in a different way.

One by one, all those prejudices against the sport, the Alps and the French had to be rethought. The slopes were not full of rude head-bangers but sweet families and locals. They weren't crowded or even very expensive. There were plenty of middle-aged beginners, the few Brits were at their best and the French character seemed to have improved considerably.

But can you really coax an unfit old dog down a precipitous slope? My personal ski school risked relationship and reputational meltdown, so decided on the tough love approach. "Feel the edges", she cried "bend the knees", "bum in, grip your poles, roll the skis, carve, weight on the front ski". She banged on and on.

When you're over 50, the body only remembers six things at once. Everything hurt. I fell out of love and down the hillside about 100 times, but we persevered. By day three, I had grasped the theory of parallel turns and was trying to pole plant.

Then illusions set in. Some fool at the bar that evening said he wanted to do the Vallée Blanche, the longest off-piste ski run in the Alps, 26km down a glacier starting at 12,000ft. He'd been skiing for umpteen years and at last felt ready for it. A secret plan formed: to do black runs by the end of week one, and the Vallée Blanche by the end of week two.

"Forget it," said Jenny. I did, and 12 months later we went back to Le Bettex, this time straight on to harder blues, moving to easy reds. Slopes that seemed impossible a year before now seemed pretty easy. Instead of the total concentration and masochism needed, it was now possible to actually enjoy it.

Darn me if those mountains stretched forever, the most beautiful, awesome, exhilarating white masses I had ever been among. We found ourselves miles from anywhere, cruising down empty runs through silent woods to isolated villages and quiet bars. The next day I was on black runs without blinking.

But the Vallée Blanche called. "You're not ready," said Jenny having taken three minutes to get down a red slope that had taken me 30. But we took a day out to Argentiere, the capital of extreme skiing at the foot of Mont Blanc, within sight of the Aiguille du Midi, the precipitous peak at the top of which the Vallée Blanche run starts. Fear set in again and all the fragile confidence gained at Le Bettex disappeared as supercool boarders shot down the slopes.

This year I managed four quiet days at the relaxed, small Swiss resort of Kandersteg which specialises in beginners, easy runs and five-star hotels.

Seven-course haute cuisine meals and underfloor heating in the Royal Park Hotel may be compensation for middle-age pains, but being delivered to and from the bubble car in a chauffeur-driven car and having a Spanish lad waiting to take my boots off can make you feel 70.

The ski school was clearly good: two British couples, in their twenties with no previous experience, with just two hours' a day tuition for a week were already confident enough to do reds and parallel turns.

The middle-aged are a fearful lot, certain that they will break bones or worse, but there's no evidence that they are any more at risk than people half their age and indeed, their natural caution probably works to their advantage.

Sadly, I've left it too late to be much more than a reasonable intermediary, but who cares? It's the mountains that count now, and in a week's time I'll get down the Vallée Blanche. Backwards. Honest.

Way to go

Getting there: Inghams (020-8780 4433, inghams.co.uk) offers seven nights' half-board at the five-star Royal Park Hotel, Kandersteg, from £620pp based on two sharing and including direct return scheduled flights from Heathrow to Zurich and transfers. Weekend breaks for three nights'half-board start from £351pp. Ski pack items can be pre-booked: six-day adult local area lift pass starts from £95; six days' ski & boot hire £96; and three days' ski school costs £42.

Further information:

Country code: 00 41.
Flight time London-Zurich: 1hr, 40mins.
Time difference: +1hr.
£1 = 2.28 Swiss francs.