I’m sitting in a glider cockpit on my very first flight, clutching the control stick as if it’s the last lolly in the shop, watching the ground streak up to meet me at 60mph.

In the back, my instructor pretends not to care about my fear. Is he asleep? Doesn’t he feel my pain? This is too steep! There are planes on the runway! That ground is too hard!

Now I’m skittering over the grass in a symphony of slithering noises that seem to last for ever, the instructor speaking at last – oh, now he cares – “I have control!” We’re pulling to a halt, lurching over like a sodden drunk as one wing dips to the hummocks and it’s finished, it’s over. I’m thinking that I have begun one of the most extraordinarily intense periods of my life. This is what it’s like, the first day on a gliding holiday.

Lasham Gliding Society is one of about 30 clubs in Britain running five-day breaks of this kind. Pitched at cloud-chasers and tourists with altitude, they provide what Clive Thomas, my instructor, called “the ultimate seat-of-the-pants flying experience”. If you’re young and good, you can theoretically be flying solo at the end of just five days. Me?

20 great learning holidays

Climbing in Mallorca, cooking in Thailand, sumoing in Japan - it’s amazing what you can learn on holiday

Top 10 breaks to get you out of a rut

Tired of listless beach holidays? From a soulful retreat in a Californian canyon to Wildfitness in Kenya, we select the best holidays to reboot your life

Kids learning holidays

How are you going to keep the kids busy this summer? Easy. Pack them off on a learning holiday (and yes, you can go too)

Oh dear. Oh golly. For me, this was an experience that crushed together the thrill of the theme park, the angst of the spiritual retreat, and the visceral fear of a survival course into one evocative thrill that drove sense from my head for long periods at a time. Learning was hard under such duress.

All the days were similarly vivid. Each morning I would leave the deceptive comfort of the Apollo Hotel in humdrum Basingstoke, Hampshire, and drive, as if to a new world, over to Lasham Airfield, a few miles south. Arriving at this vast former RAF facility I would confront three runways, the longest stretching to 6,000ft (1,830m), fringed by an assortment of buildings, including bar, restaurant, caravans and hut accommodation, all thronged with jolly folk in floppy hats pushing planes and swapping flying tales as if in a Second World War movie. I duly joined the cast.

There were four on my course – all males, ages 30 to 72 – and the amazing thing was the speed with which we found ourselves actually flying. The breakfast tea was hardly dry on our lips before we were climbing into cockpits and rocketing into blustery skies. Then down, then up, then down, then up. And so it went.

You might think that gliding is a natural, easily acquired skill, but it isn’t so, at least not for me, not 3,000ft above the ground, knowing that the fluid, fluctuating, invasive demands of lift and thrust could produce, at best, a stomach-lurching dip if ignored for an instant. At worst? That hard, hard ground.

And yes, there was always an instructor behind me: the two who shared responsibility for my education – Clive Thomas and Bob Johnson – were both brilliantly skillful.

“I have control!” they would shout, slamming on forgotten air-brakes or inching the dipping nose away from looming trees. I was safe, but didn’t feel so. In the end that proved to be the whole point, and a good point, too. But that came later.

Meanwhile, the days, when not interrupted by weather, amounted to: arrive, fly, land, fly, land, fly, land. And so on, up to five or six flights daily, each lasting between 10 minutes and an hour, with lunch in the caff providing a chummy reprise over chips. Sometimes the stories we swapped were funny – like the time I tried to honk up into my hat after a stall. Sometimes they were scary.

For instance, to get aloft we were occasionally towed from the runway by small plane, and once I found myself actually trying to overtake the plane while still attached – watching in horror as the line between us formed a curiously drooping bow . . . which then snapped taut with a judder. And on we flew.

But it was the winch-launches that took me to the very edge of competence. You sit in the front of your glider watching with absorbed fascination as a towrope several thousand feet long begins to snake away fast in front of you. Then the power hits and you find yourself accelerating from nought to 60mph (100km/h) in three seconds and off the ground, clinging to the controls as if life itself hangs on them – which, of course, it does.

Yet for every such shock there was reward of the most tranquil, almost spiritual kind. Releasing the tow at around 1,400ft was deeply fulfilling, a liberating instant in which power and speed and noise were replaced in an instant by hissing silence. When I finally got it right, after many attempts, the sound I treasured most of all was the single sentence from my instructor: “That’s it.” On and on we flew over the Hampshire countryside, floating and sinking at the same time – six tranquil miles covered for every 1,000ft lost in height. I knew these figures now by heart, you see.

But backtrack a little and imagine ten attempts to reach this moment of mild success, ten “I have control!” shouts. Do you feel what I felt? Up there, the skills lay partly in accepting that the plane’s movements could be directed; but also in making control so automatic that you could take time to spot thermals under dark clouds, then bank and turn to them, round and round, stomach fluttering...

Once, I was even allowed to trace fairytale courses between vast, architectural avenues of white, fluffy cumulus as if this were indeed a movie and for this moment I was one of The Few. Though did The Few honk into their hats? I think not.

It was on my last day that I received my best excuse for daily fear, daily failure (to land properly, to know where I was up there, to relax entirely, ever). Tugging my glider back to the launch point after a flight I glanced up to see another craft drifting in over the trees. Without warning, it did exactly as I had been dreaming in my grimmest moments – simply fell out of the sky. There, right in front of me, the impossible had actually happened.

The pilot was not seriously hurt, thank heavens, yet I was left reflecting on this later – on the realities of gliding, though in a strangely comforted way. It should have put me off, I suppose. But what I actually thought about, over and over, was not the crash itself but its context: that moment at the top of the winch, pulling the yellow release handle, feeling the craft come alive in a mixture of fear and elation. If crashes were not possible, you see, I would not have felt so elated, it’s as simple as that.

I’ve never taken a break of such enormous impact, such soaring heights.

Need to know

Nicholas Roe took a five-day gliding course run by Lasham Gliding Society (01256 384900, www.lasham.org.uk) from April to September from £475pp. Trial lessons are £80. He stayed at the Apollo Hotel, Aldermaston Roundabout, Basingstoke (01256 796700, www.apollohotels.com), B&B singles from £65, doubles from £75.
Information on other local courses: British Gliding Association (0116-253 1051, www.gliding.co.uk).
Tourist information: www.visitsoutheastengland.com.

Times recommends

• Friday: latest flight and airport news
• Ski guide school in Whistler
• The best festivals in France, 2010