Are you familiar with Buridan’s ass? Well, let me explain. Buridan was a French priest of the 14th century credited with devising a philosophical paradox involving an ass (as in donkey, sadly) that finds itself exactly halfway between two identical piles of hay, is unable to make a rational decision about which to start eating, and so stays put and starves to death.

I am that ass. Only there are three piles of hay – let’s call them “downhill skiing”, “cross-country skiing” and “snowboarding” – and instead of dying, I’ve simply never been on a winter-sports holiday because I didn’t know which of the three to try.

But the answer, which suddenly hit me as I flicked listlessly between different sections of a winter-sports brochure, was “all three”. And that is how I ended up in Geilo, western Norway, on a long weekend, trying to learn three sports from scratch – with just one day for each...

DAY 1: Downhill skiing

Distance covered on skis: 600 metres

On backside: 40 metres

On face: 2 metres

Number of descents: 11

Number of falls: 6

Fun factor: 9; fear factor: 7; prat factor: 4

Cost (two-hour lesson plus hire): £100

There are few sounds more chilling than the scornful laughter of six-year-old girls. And behind those big blue eyes and pretty blonde pigtails, it seems, lie deep wells of derision reserved especially for adult Englishmen who can turn right very nicely thank you very much, but for some reason can’t seem to manage left at all.

I’m 40 minutes into my two-hour lesson. I’ve mastered my fear, rescinded my initial insistence that “There’s something wrong with my skis”, and I’ve even been allowed to use ski poles. (For my first few forays down the shallow toe of the nursery slope, my instructor had taken them off me and told me to put my hands on my knees, which made me feel as though I were being punished for being a beginner by not being allowed even to look like a proper skier.)

Getting from halfway up a hill to the bottom, it turns out, is pretty easy; and the feared “snowplough” is a simple matter of pointing your feet together. Even turning left soon comes to be as natural as, uh, turning left. I don’t get that much out of my instructor – a handsome, unsmilingly stoical Swede called Stefan – but Geilo’s green-rated slopes are as forgiving as Stefan is stolid: wide, uncrowded pistes and soft, powdery snow mean mistakes don’t hurt.

Granted, I’m still only on green runs, but I’m amazed to find that, after just four hours, I am, in fact, skiing. I can control my speed, stop at will, get down the mountain without falling – and, crucially, hold my head up in front of infants.

After a cafe lunch of nachos buried in industrial quantities of cheese and sour cream (I’d always envied skiers the guiltless I’ve-earned-it relish with which they could tuck into this kind of stuff), I was back on the snow, and shaking my head in delighted disbelief that it could be so exhilaratingly fun and so effortless and unscary at the same time. I was even happier when I discovered “skiways”. Like little footpaths that link the pistes (except you ski down them), they’re even better than the real runs because they’re longer, quieter, more scenic and come with the added satisfaction that they’re actually taking you somewhere you want to get to. As the light started to fail, in fact, I skiwayed from the top of the mountain all the way to my hotel’s back door in one great, long, thrilling 10-minute run – and the smile didn’t leave my face all evening.

DAY 2: Cross-country skiing

On skis: 2,500 metres

On backside: 6 metres

On face: 2 metres

Backwards: 120 metres

Number of descents: 3

Number of falls: 8

Fun factor: 6; fear factor: 4; prat factor: 3

Cost (two-hour lesson plus hire): £90

It’s one of the world’s great smells. Clean, green pine needles mixed with the warming wood smoke of a hundred hearths heating their respective homes. Bottle it and you could make a million from the toilet-cleansing fluids alone.

And, for me at least, it’s laced with the refreshing tang of dispelled preconceptions: I had always thought a winter-sports holiday had to mean ugly resorts and arguably uglier après-ski raucousness. But Geilo is a town of tall, straight, silver trees and frozen lakes fed by iced white rivers; the Arctic drama softened by cosy wooden houses with Dulux-white snow piled waist-high, and icicles hanging feet-long from pretty eaves.

The scenery, it’s clear, is the chief appeal of cross-country skiing, but you can’t enjoy it fully as a beginner. It’s difficult, after all, to savour the quiet, romantic isolation when you’ve got a cheerless Swede (hi, Stefan!) telling you to bend your knees. Again.

It takes me all morning to get anything approaching the hang of it. Going downhill, of course, is relatively straightforward; but the regular requirement to get uphill on skis (yes, those things that have been designed for sliding) makes the whole experience much harder than yesterday’s. It takes a bizarre kind of wide-legged, Shakin’ Stevens frog-walk to negotiate the inclines, and the exertion it demands makes XC skiing the perfect choice for those who are either very fit or wish to become so quite fast.

When my lesson ends, at lunchtime, I’m at last able to get off the (literally) beaten track and enjoy the silence of a day so still that the falling snow seems just to hang in the air rather than actually fall. I dine on items stolen from the hotel breakfast buffet: soft, oaty brown bread; butter that tastes so natural and fine and wholesome that you think the stuff must actually be good for you after all; and simply the best smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted.

With Stefan gone, I head off randomly down a few of Geilo’s 130 miles of interlinking XC trails. I never quite settle into a rhythm of uninterrupted enjoyment – thanks to occasional falls, the regular need to stop and catch my breath, and frustratingly frequent episodes of accidentally sliding down hills I’ve just busted a couple of guts climbing. But just five minutes out of town, I’m where I want to be: no sound but the whispering swish of ski on snow, no sight but powder and pine, no colours but green and white, and no thoughts bothering my brain but the quiet satisfaction of a hill well climbed and a slope well slid down.

The day before had definitely been more exciting, but this one came with a wonderful sense of calm that not even an evening in the company of my hotel’s cheesy pop-covers band could puncture.

DAY 3: Snowboarding

On board: 40 metres

On backside: 40 metres

On face: 40 metres

Number of descents: 0.75

Number of falls: 25

Number of injuries: 1 (sprained wrist)

Fun factor: 6; fear factor: 7; prat factor: 8

Cost (two-hour lesson plus hire): £100

The guys in the shop exchange a look and a few brief words – and you don’t need to be a Norwegian speaker to tell what they’re saying. “Here’s another one,” Terje is very obviously telling Christian, “who’s seen too many Pepsi Max adverts.”

Somehow I feel far more foolish asking for beginners’ snowboard tuition than I did when requesting novice-level skiing or cross-country lessons (perhaps something to do with boarding’s reputation as the coolest of the sports). But I’ve been told that this is actually the easiest of the three to learn, so I’m pretty confident that Terje will be eating his words – or at least his raised eyebrow – within a couple of hours.

Unfortunately, I have been misled. Snowboarding is as difficult as bombing down a mountain, standing on a tea tray that’s been specially polished by malicious teenagers who have also taken the trouble to bind your feet to it. How do you slow down? Steer yourself perpendicular to the slope. How do you steer yourself? God knows.

Christian is a much better teacher than Stefan: tirelessly patient, and so enthusiastic that each time he tells me I’ve really cracked it now, I believe him for the few brief seconds until I fall over again. But in truth it takes me most of the first hour just to master getting on and falling off the uphill travelator that replaces ski lifts on the snowboard nursery slope. I glide off the top end of it with all the grace of a bag of potatoes making a bid for freedom from the supermarket checkout conveyor belt.

On the previous two days, I felt I only really improved my skills once the lessons ended and I could practise freely; here, it was the opposite. Difficult as it was, I knew I was getting better (or at least less bad) every time Christian guided me through a descent. When my two hours of tuition were up, though, I felt stranded; common sense had got me down the ski slopes, but boarding seemed more technical – I actually needed someone to tell me which way to lean.

Time spent lying on my face in the snow was punctuated by tantalising moments of success – some as long as three or four seconds on end – and these brief flickers were the most thrilling of my whole trip, like breathing champagne through an oxygen mask. But my greed was catching up with me. It’s not uncommon to find yourself aching in seldom-used joints when you take up an unfamiliar sport; I had taken up three. I was feeling the strain in several quite distinct sets of hitherto-undiscovered sinews (who knew I had so many muscles? I felt I must have more than Mr Universe). So with only a couple of hours of my weekend remaining, I shamefully abandoned my snowboard in favour of what I now absurdly thought of as “my old friends”, the humble downhill skis.

It was certainly downhill skiing that I enjoyed the most over my three-day trip, but with just a few hours spent on each discipline, I’m not really in any position to offer definitive advice on which to choose. Except, perhaps, to suggest that [winces and rubs back ruefully] you don’t attempt all three in one weekend.

Ed Grenby travelled as a guest of Inntravel

Travel brief

Getting there: fly to Oslo with Scandinavian Airlines (0870 60 727 727), British Airways (0870 850 9850), Norwegian Air Shuttle, or Ryanair (0871 246 0000).

From there, catch a train (www.nsb.no), with wooden panelling and big windows, to Geilo, in Norway’s moorland region of Hardangervidda.

Where to stay: the Bardola hotel (00 47 32 09 41 00) has 128 rooms, 26 nice log cabins, great food and a skiway to its door. Doubles cost from £135, B&B.

Tour operator: a week at the Bardola hotel with Inntravel (01653 617906) costs from £755pp, based on two sharing, including seven nights’ half-board and a lunch pack daily, return Heathrow-Oslo flights with SAS, rail connection and private transfers. Or try Specialised Tours (01342 712785) or Crystal Ski (0870 405 5047).

Many thanks to Ellis Brigham (0161 833 0746) for supplying ski and snowboard gear, and to Madshus (01249 652101) for the cross-country skiing equipment.

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