Remarkably few British people have – principally, I suspect, because it is not offered by any of the big travel companies. I eventually tracked down Inntravel, an admirably efficient operation in York that specialises in slightly offbeat holidays, and had a number of cross-country options.We chose Cogne mainly because it looked pretty in the brochure, but also because Italy is a rather safer bet than France for vegetarians (of whom my wife is one) It all worked beautifully. We decided, slightly nervously, to ignore those who told us that cross-country was the most exhausting sport there is: none of our informants had in fact tried it. My wife and I felt like a couple of Morris Minors that had strayed on to a practice session at Silverstone – but the Ferraris were good humoured, hopping out of the prepared tracks and whooshing past us without any opprobrious (or, at least, audibly opprobrious) comments.We had chosen to go cross-country skiing because we wanted to ski but were of quite different standards downhill, so would not otherwise have spent much time together. The ski trails were hardly crowded, but most of the people we did see were in full, Lycra-clad training mode.

The day after we left, 1,300 skiers were to take part in the Marcia Gran Paradiso, a 45-km slog to the ends of three valleys, then back to the centre. In some places it is still just a way of getting about, but in Italy it has developed into a sport with at least some of the trappings of the downhill jobby.We were staying in Cogne, in the Aosta Valley – not much known among downhill skiers (though there is a cable car, and some of the emptiest pistes in Christendom), but a great centre for cross-country skiing. It has many names: cross-country, langlauf, ski de fond and – here in Italy – sci nordico. No pressure, no lift queues- and shoes that are more like comfy trainers than Neil Armstrong’s number 12s.Cross-country skiing is the original form of skiing – indeed, it was the only form until some plucky Brits built the first ski lifts 100 years or so ago.

This was cross- country skiing, the gentle cousin of downhill.One of its advantages is that you can, if you want, take off your skis and go ibex-spotting instead. They lent us their binoculars and, yes, there was the ibex with its horns. Funny looking things, ibexes.The funnier thing was that we were supposed to be on a skiing holiday.We were indeed on a skiing holiday – but not the sort where we and 1,000 others went up a mountain slowly and came down it fast. We tramped back through the forest, following a path trodden in the snow by some maniacs who were climbing frozen waterfalls farther up the valley. We passed a couple of elderly locals, the first people we had seen for an hour.

Though it was on a ledge on the mountainside opposite, and we had no binoculars, there was no mistaking those horns. David Bowen took a gentler route across country – and found a few natural

bonuses along the way
The ibex is a strange beast, with great, curving horns almost as long as its stumpy legs. There’s more to skiing than screaming down the black runs and scaring the life out of your nearest and dearest. They deserve luck, and will above all need persistence to keep it that way.Lord Hurd is a former foreign secretary, and was MP for East Oxfordshire, and later Witney, from 1974 to 1997.. Here you can fall in love, become romantically attached to a Bloomingdales charge card, and take moonlit horse-drawn rides through Central Park.Woody Allen tells this joke: “And, uh, tsch, I was depressed I was … European cities have had the monopoly on romance, but now that air fares to across the Atlantic are at their lowest ever, how about

New York for the ultimate hearthrob? Adam Shaw is convinced he made the
right choiceNew York: Woody Allen adores it, Quentin Crisp is devoted to it, Damon Runyon immortalised it and Frank Sinatra named it twice.