I thought snowboarding was something my kids should aspire to, but it's ridiculously tricky to start with and quite painful

I’ve been invited skiing for a week by a French friend with an empty ski chalet. Sounds like a result? You’d be wrong. I’m so cold at the moment that the last thing I feel like doing is packing my family into the wagon and joining a 50-mile long traffic jam up into the Alps to ski alongside most of the Tory Cabinet.

Actually that’s unlikely, as I’m going to Courchevel, which is almost entirely Russian and is supposedly the next place on the list to be annexed after the Ukraine. Sometimes Russian hegemony is a good thing.

I only recently took my kids to the Alps and tried to be a cool dad by getting them to learn to snowboard. To me, snowboarders are cooler than skiiers. They have relaxed, non-pastel clothing and, most importantly, comfortable boots. Admittedly most boarders are annoying stoners who wander around talking rubbish but, to my middle-aged eyes, they appear hip and what my kids should aspire to. So I put them in snowboard school and they spent an incredibly unhappy week repeatedly falling on their arses while contemporaries learning to ski sailed past them whooping and a’hollerin’.

The thing I’ve learned is that, although snowboarding looks effortless and elegant, it’s ridiculously tricky to start with and quite painful. Meanwhile “old school” skiing has got its act together. In the old days you would be handed a couple of planks of wood and told to get on with it by a dodgy looking Swiss gentleman. Now, skis have become tapered and scientific – they are now so simple that almost anyone can snap on a pair and make their way down a steep mountain with a modicum of style and bravura. Part of me thinks the Alpine folk always knew skiing could be made easy but they’d deliberately made it hard, to create jobs for locals when the idiot Hooray Henrys turn up brandishing credit cards.

How come it took so long for the Swiss to invent easy skis when they moved so fast on perfecting the watch and holes in cheese? So this trip we had to admit defeat and allow our kids to try and learn to ski before their friends start to report them for suspiciously “gnarly” activity.

With all this in mind I tried to book some ski lessons for my little Gauleiters and got hold of some Sloaney bloke called Toby who said he could arrange it all. The following morning I checked my email in a blur without my reading glasses and thought I saw an email from Toby. I opened it and didn’t demur when he asked for my Mac account password as he had a message for me. Like an idiot I tapped in my password only to find some weird message about reducing belly fat. Half an hour later and everything went bat-s***. It turned out that I’d opened some spam email and unwittingly allowed the “bot” to access my account and to send weird emails to everyone I’ve ever emailed demanding intriguing services and curious favours.

I need to escape. Maybe Putin will give me asylum? I could make friends with Edward Snowden.