The wake up call was swift, our disillusionment brutal. Chairlifts are hard for beginners to get off at the best of times, but when you’re a short-legged 12-year-old, disembarking for the very first time onto the icy slopes of a late afternoon in Norway, your chances of emerging unbruised are worse than zero.

“The wake up call was swift, our disillusionment brutal”

From there things went downhill, fast. Not literally of course, we must have been moving at a snail’s pace as we wobbled our way haphazardly down the piste. But as we skidded to and fro, the constant sequence of coccyx-crushing slams interrupted only by the occasional toe-edge scorpion, our spirits sank.

I have no way of verifying whether this is true or not, but in the mental picture I have of that afternoon, it was dark by the time we made it to the bottom. Worse still, while all of us had sustained bruised arses bad enough to stop us from sitting down comfortably for the rest of the week, my cousin James had done something visibly more serious to one of his wrists.

That all of this sprung out of such an unpromising start says a lot about the ability of the Norwegian snowboard instructor who turned up to teach our chastened group the morning after that first, fateful brush with the snow. I can’t, unfortunately, remember his name, but I do remember thinking he was the coolest person we’d ever met. Stereotypically tall and blond, he looked and sounded like a Nordic god, and we revered him like one.

“When someone offers you your dream job, you don’t say no”

The timing helped too of course. Snowboarding was blowing up in terms of popularity, but still had its youthful edge. You didn’t see snowboarders over the age of about 25, and everything about it – from the tricks, to the board graphics, to the baggy clothes – just oozed effortless cool. As with Ali’s copy of Sidewalk (which I also remember reading that first week), every page of a snowboard magazine felt like a new window on a whole world of radness. It wasn’t like I even understood all the language, or got all the references (later I would learn that 90s snowboard mags, including Whitelines, were notorious for their in-jokes) but that just made it even cooler.

More than anything though, the fact that I carried on with snowboarding after that bruising first encounter is testament to the addictive nature of the sport itself. Even without the help of a Chris Hemsworth-alike to teach us how to turn properly, we’d already stumbled on something fundamental during that first, foolish descent. Every now and then, between the wildly out-of-control slides to the left and right, you’d get an edge in, find your balance, and for a fleeting second, you’d almost feel in control. As we went down, those fleeting seconds would get longer and longer. It might have been incremental, but by the time we got to the bottom, we’d improved.

“The fact that I carried on with snowboarding after that bruising first encounter is testament to the addictive nature of the sport itself”

I’ve ridden all over the world in the 20 years since, from Kazakhstan to Colorado, tackling all kinds of terrain, in all kinds of conditions. But wherever you’re riding, and whatever level you’re at, the essential thrill is the same: It’s about pushing yourself to try something new, scaring yourself a bit in the process, improving incrementally and eventually nailing it. Whether you’re straight-lining a Chamonix couloir, or fumbling your way down your first green run, it’s that feeling of being in control – but not too in control – of something dangerous. That just never gets old.

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