When I was 18 years old my best friend, Jules Harrison, was killed in a skiing accident. It will be 21 years ago next month. So I would probably have been thinking about fatal skiing accidents anyway.

We had lunch at Pizza Hut in Hampstead the day before he left for Zermatt. He parked his father's Rover (the one we had crashed in Fitzjohn's Avenue, drunk, aged 16, a couple of years before) right outside. The restaurant is a Starbuck's now (obviously), and you certainly aren't allowed to park outside.

I was disappointed that he was going. I had only two friends then, and could ill afford to lose one of them for even a week, let alone a lifetime.

“Skiing's for losers, man,” I told him, jealously. “It's for poncey French tossers and Sloanes and malcos who can't play football.”

“It's only because you can't do it,” said Jules. “And stop saying ‘man' all the time.”

It's true, I couldn't ski. I'd been on a school trip once, wearing borrowed ladies' salopettes and an awful woolly hat, and I'd floundered miserably on the nursery slopes with a group of Italian toddlers, terrified for my life, while a nut-brown Austrian instructor barked the kind of terrifying orders that an Englishman can take, from an Austrian, for only so long. And occasionally Jules, a famously skilled and fearless skier, would rocket across the group, backwards, on one ski, smoking a cigar and laughing.

I hated skiing. I hated the lack of control. I hated the sliding. I hated the stupid T-bar lift, which you fall off and then aren't allowed to get back on to but have to slide all the way down to the bottom on your arse (because you can't ski) and then queue again for it with a load of foreign bastards who can't even play cricket. And then fall off again.

I hated the huge uncomfortable boots that made blisters on your shins, and which you couldn't walk in at lunch time except heel-and-toeing like Robocop, clumpety, clumpety clump.

I hated the chairlifts going up, up, up above the bloody trees, and then sometimes the mountain falls away on the other side and it's 3,000ft down - woooaaaahhh - and you think you're going to throw up, and it suddenly stops in mid-air because some fat Swiss fool has dropped his Rolex. And you swing there. Silently. Rocking and squeaking in the breeze. Holding your breath... and then a fighter plane on manoeuvres, piloted by some reckless Italian soldier boy in Raybans, swoops low and slices the cable, and you fall, helpless, to your death, still strapped into your steel chair.

Or you go over a cliff edge. Those crazy, mental corners. There's ice, your skis slide out and out, your pathetic learner's snowplough falls to bits and there's no option but to throw yourself to the floor to avoid hurtling over the edge. So you do, and you bang your head only gently. But still there is epidural haematoma, and you die.

“Walk-and-die” syndrome. Some holiday.

And if you don't die, you break things. The kids in school after the Christmas holidays with their legs in plaster, everybody signing the cast, drawing cartoon faces, like broken limbs are funny. I didn't break legs on holiday. I went to the beach. Swam. Read books. I didn't muffle up in scratchy thermals and stupid brightly coloured puffy anoraks and that year's fashionable sunglasses, and slide up and down hills.

I hated the posh mums and dads who brought their children to school late after the holidays because of skiing. In their Range Rovers, with the ski mounts still on the roof rack.

I hated how people always came back talking about the glühwein, and the food. “Oh yah, it's basically just an excuse for nosh and plonk. You ski down to this marvellous place for glühwein and tartiflette, and get rarely, rarely pissed and then ski home.”

Have you ever eaten tartiflette? Course you have; you ski. I hate tartiflette - an oily mess of cheesy starch for morons who have worn themselves out in futile kinesis and then frozen themselves solid. Tartiflette is rations, not lunch. And as for raclette - if you can call melted cheese wiped on to a slice of ham a national cuisine then you must be, well, Swiss.

And I've always hated how people think that skiing is “sooo much more rewarding than just lying on a beach - I can't bear to just lie about on holiday, I need to have action or I go mad...” Really? Well, that's because you are an imbecile. Only the stupid need to be constantly engaged. Only the boring are bored by inactivity. Holidays are for reading. And for reflection. For self-examination. They are when you take quarterly stock of your situation (like a spiritual VAT return), determine where to go next in your life, and prepare to return to it resolved and composed.

They're not for getting so drunk during karaoke night at a Méribel bar that you get lost on the way home and disappear down a crevasse, to be spat out, perfectly preserved, 10,000 years later, as the glacier's eternal turn and slide decides finally to let you go.

The last thing I said to Jules, as I waved him off in his car down the High Street, was: “Be careful, man, really, it's dangerous.”

And I think he probably just laughed, and told me not to call him “man”. I don't remember exactly. Either way, he wiped out at speed and came home in a box. And immediately I understood that his death had been unavoidable. His life quickly gathered about it the literal paraphernalia of tragedy. It was clear to me that Jules was always going to die. Was a dead boy walking. And skiing was merely the agent by which it was always going to be brought about.

And so for the next 20 years I had an excuse not to go skiing. I dodged a hundred jollies up a hundred different mountains with the sad tale of how I lost my only pal to skiing, and so wouldn't be able to make it. And it saved me from telling them the real reasons I wouldn't go. Which they wouldn't have understood. The morons.

And then, two years ago, I tried again. I bowed to pressure. I went to Courchevel. I had private lessons every day, just me, the instructor and, of all people, Vincent Cable (don't ask, just let me assure you the old guy is far more assured and confident on the economy than he is on a pair of sliding planks). And I found it a doddle. Red runs in no time. Thought maybe this is OK. Thought maybe I would surrender my whole personality and everything I hold dear, and start going annually.

And then this with poor Natasha Richardson. Not recklessly flying into a solid object or over a ledge because she wasn't as good as she thought she was (which skiers never, EVER, are), but killed, most tragically of all, learning. Learning at 45. Finally giving in to peer pressure after decades of reluctance, perhaps, because she was fed up with people braying on about the glories of skiing all the time, and of feeling left out.

It certainly can't be that she had not skied before for lack of opportunity. Because in a modern middle-class life, believe me, it is not going skiing every year that is the really difficult thing.

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