8th March 2002
To get lessons or not to get lessons. The age old dilemma. Is it better to work things out for yourself, failing and succeeding as fate decrees, or is it better to seek out expert instruction and be guided by a master? Individuals vary as to which method they prefer. Personally, I am firmly in favour of the former. You can only feel you've mastered something if you've worked it out from the beginning and developed your own style. Although this is the path I am drawn to by nature, I have not always held such a view. Between February 2001 and February 2002 I would have advised all who asked to always seek instruction. What was responsible for this change of heart? And what changed it back? A combination of snow, mountains, and story-telling.

February 2001, when my first change of heart was to occur:

We all know skiing. We all love skiing. You strap a couple of planks to your legs. You get taken up a mountain and you slide down it, intermittently falling over and hurting yourself. After months / years of planning, my friends and I finally got our acts together and went to Andorra. I'd decided, true to my nature, that the lessons I'd had on one afternoon on a dry ski slope when I was 11 would be enough to see me through. Faster - skis straight, slower - skis v-shaped. How hard could it be?

My main mistake was thinking that the first ski-lift took you only to beginner runs. No. Left at the top was a beginner run. Right was intermediate. As I was getting my first ever taste of real skiing, flying down the right-hand slope, I came to the conclusion that the snow-plough didn't work. In fact, it positively seemed to make me go faster. Have you ever planned what you would do if you didn't know how to ski and found yourself hurtling out of control down a mountain at 30 mph? Well nor had I, and I was coming to regret my lack of planning. I considered there were two main ways I was likely to come to a stop. The first was hitting a person. The second was hitting a tree. The first would be bad for me and bad for them. The second would be good for them and potentially fatal for me. I looked round hopefully for some fat woman in my path. No luck. Next best - fat man? All out of stock. It was 9 am and there wasn't a sole about. At least no-one would see me make a fool of myself. But then nobody would see somebody critically injured and lying face down in the snow either. I was just getting to the point of considering which bone would be least inconvenient to break when I noticed that my skis were considerably further from the ground than my head. A moment later, my head was in the right position again, but my skis appeared to have disappeared altogether. The next few moments were a cascade of tumbling and coldness. I realised on about the third role that it looked like I was coming to a stop without use of either trees or fat people. How fortunate. Why didn't I think of this before? Never mind. Now all I had to do was not get too hurt in the fall.

A few moments later, I found myself lying motionless in the snow. For a minute, I just lay there and enjoyed being motionless. Next I checked for excruciating pain. Nothing registering, so no broken bones. It was looking good. Finally I picked myself up and looked around for my skis. The rental shop had the good sense to give me bright red ones. This meant it wasn't too difficult to locate them once I'd trekked a few minutes back up the mountain. As I walked down, skis in hand, I reluctantly decided to have a lesson.

Zoom forward a year, and find me on my way to the slopes, snow-board in hand. Given my life-changing experience of a year earlier, I was going to have lessons. So I did. I found a group of people, and an instructor showed us how you snowboard. I then spent the rest of the weekend practicing snowboarding. And what happened? Nothing. I just told you everything. I spent the rest of the weekend practicing snowboarding. And that's what it was - practicing doing something that someone else had told me to do. Any funny stories? No. Any life-threatening events? None. Any injuries? Well, a few, but what do you expect when you're learning to snowboard? In short, I came back with nothing interesting to say about snowboarding. I had to fill up the space above telling you a story that happened over a year ago. What kind of adrenalin pumped sport is that? A rubbish one, that's what.

So I'm back to my old ways. Don't take lessons. Don't do what better informed people tell you to do. Don't read the manual. Don't take driving lessons. Don't hang back and cover the midfield. Don't pass the ball.

Fight the system. The revolution has started.