As you read this, I'll have just finished a week of snowboarding in the French Alps with some friends. Now this might sound like unbearable showing off - a bit like those people who breezily ring your office to tell you they're off to Mauritius for two weeks, just in case you're wondering why they can't return your call. It's thoroughly irritating, I know, so if you're the kind of person who would trade in your beloved grandmother for a week's snowboarding right now, then apologies in advance for this column.
In my defence, I only mention my holiday because I can think of nothing else as I write this column. I had it in mind to write something terribly witty about what not to do on a first date, about how you should avoid spaghetti sauces and swimming pools like the plague, but I found that I just couldn't write a word for thinking about snowboarding. My hands on the keyboard weren't functioning properly - which may have something to do with my clenched fists, my white knuckles, and my palms, which are sweatier than a drug courier at the sight of an Alsatian.
You see, it has finally dawned on me that I am going to have to get up on that darned snowboard again and I'm absolutely petrified. I'm just about to set out on a journey that is going to take me to the bottom of a snowdrift, the depths of despair and the height of humiliation.
You see, I went snowboarding for the first time last year, when a bunch of friends who go regularly suggested that it was something I might enjoy. The poor souls lived to regret any such optimism - I was appallingly bad at it, managing to fall off regularly and develop an unprecedented inability to use skilifts. I also discovered the unfortunate truth that I was obviously having a cup of tea and a manicure when balance, co-ordination and motor skills were given out.
However, the worst part of the whole thing, as far as my friends were concerned, was my new-found inability to cope with this situation. I don't like to think of myself as a moaner - while I was definitely expelled from the pull-your-socks-up school of thought, I've long since realised that talking at length about how terrible things are tends to make you even more aware of just how terrible things are. Far better to buy something unnecessary and brood at length when you're in a hot bath nursing a gin and tonic.
However, the snowboard situation got so bad that there was no point lying about it. When everybody else bounced in from a day on the slopes looking like Ready-Brek kids and inquiring how the day went, I used to smile brightly and say something airy like "Absolutely shite, thanks". As my falls got worse and my dashing instructor got increasingly irascible, I'm afraid to say that there were tears before bedtime. All in all, the snowboarding end of things did not go well.
When I returned, I was full of amusing tales of falling on my head and hilarious plans to blow up the entire Alpine region. Rather more foolishly, I also wrote an article about learning to snowboard and my own inability to do same. So unsurprisingly, everyone from my mother to my colleagues, to the guy in the ski-supply shop, have been a little curious about my repeat performance. Right now, when it's only a question of hours before I'm once again strapped onto a tea tray on marbles, I'm more than a little curious myself.
There's the es-apresski of course - despite the assault course during the day, I still thoroughly enjoyed last year's holiday. It's rare that you get to feel healthy and smug about setting off on a night out with your friends, but after a day spent dicing with death, the nights tended to be full of good humour, bad nightclubs and guiltless overeating. The thought of missing out on the fun this year made me feel like the time I got tonsillitis and didn't get to see the magician at Karen's party, aged nine.
But even I wouldn't spend so much money just for a few good nights out, and really, you'd think that the terror I felt last year would put me off even the best of Eurotrash nightclubs. The thing is, despite that terror, despite the headlong falls, and despite the humiliating experience of lining up with a dozen six-year-olds on the nursery slopes, I really wanted to give the old snowboarding thing another try.,
To a certain extent, this is because I'm stubborn and refuse to let a bit of snow and fibreglass get the better of me. I just don't like to think that a future career as a professional boarder in Aspen, Colorado is ruled out just because I didn't go back and try it for a second year. Then there's my optimism, despite all the odds, that this time, when I get onto the board the music from the Old Spice advertisement will roll and I'll take off in an elegant display of cutting, slicing and half-pipe action.
If I'm being truthful, there's an element of the Stingy Lulu about going back again too. I manage my finances with a kind of warped logic that would make my bank manager shiver if I ever decide to share it with her. Under these rules of practice, it's a frugal idea to spend a whole wodge of cash on a second snowboarding holiday in the hope that I'll be able to stay upright at the end of a week, as this would mean that the wodge of cash I spent on the first one wasn't completely wasted. "You have to spend money to save money", I keep saying, although I haven't yet worked out where the saving bit kicks in.
But the real, true, middle-of-the-night-honesty reason I'm going back is because of that activity known to the therapy culture as confronting your fears. Last year's experience of being terribly bad at snowboarding and being terribly poor about dealing with it, was not just about an inability to get down mountains. It reminded me of all the things I couldn't do, ever. It brought back all the times when I couldn't see how something was possible and had a temper tantrum to prove it. It made me feel totally helpless.
So when the chance came to give it another try, to maybe get to a state where I enjoy myself or at least deal with my own inability with a bit more humour, I just had to do it. It's bloody-minded, it's terribly gungho and it's not just a little bit stupid to go snowboarding again, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Life is just too full of terrifying, scary and unnerving things to start getting a taste for giving up.