When I signed up for a two-day “winter walking” course, I mistakenly thought I already knew how to walk. After all, I’d been at it for half a century or more.

But no, it wasn’t good enough for Sandra: I had to learn a new way of perambulating, she said. One that involved a fresh rhythm. And much bigger steps.

My heart sank at this. I had come with my family to Saas-Fee, in southern Switzerland, with the express intention of avoiding accented instructors of any discipline.

My official reason for opting out was simple: the spirit was willing but the knees were weak. That was partly true – the right is a bit dodgy – but I also factored in that last time out, I found myself suddenly bored with all the palaver.

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All that endless clomping about in boots that belonged in a Tower of London torture chamber, humping uncooperative skis around while dressed in more layers than a millefeuille, had palled. The fact that the early-morning hordes of ski-clacking students reminded me of nothing more than a multicoloured rookery of emperor penguins sealed it for me. I won’t ski again. You can’t make me.

This stance was not popular with the family: competitive wife champed to take to the slopes again, elder daughter wanted to learn, other daughter and son had decided that if I didn’t let them try snowboarding, I was up there with Bing Crosby in the bad-fathering stakes.

Thus bullied, I found Saas-Fee came up as the resort of choice by a process of elimination. The destination had to cater for someone who didn’t want to lab-rat it up and down the mountains all week, it had to be high enough to guarantee snow early in the season for those that did, be a pretty village, car-free, family-friendly, devoid of too many Chanel ski suits, and accommodating to both skiers and snowboarders.

Miraculously, Saas-Fee scored well on all counts. My 15-year-old daughter later complained that her skiing instructor was not the mountain hunk she had anticipated (“He’s even older than you, Dad”) and that the resort had a shortage of available “fit” men of her demographic. This, as any parent of a teenage girl can appreciate, was double-bonus points for Saas-Fee.

Drawbacks? The village itself is in shade for much of the day early in the season, but it isn’t hard to get up into the sun. There are only a few winter charter flights to the nearest airport, Sion, an hour away by car (a Geneva transfer is about three hours). I was also warned that it has a limited ski area compared with, say, Zermatt and that experts might be bored with just five black runs. Like I cared.

But, in short, it was perfect... until Sandra started on my troublesome gait.

Although I had declared my intention of spending the days in various bars, trying to catch up with my own personal avalanche, that of unread back issues of The New Yorker, I knew I had to find some kind of activity, just to join in with the you-had-to-be-there stories with the family.

So I went along to the feisty Sandra, who owns Eskimos, the minnow of the two ski schools in the village, the other being the mighty Moby-Dick of the Swiss Ski and Snowboard School. I had decided I wanted to snowshoe, but Sandra told me we needed a fresh fall of snow for that to be worthwhile.

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