On easy groomed runs you are bursting with confidence, but once the going gets tough your technique – and hence your enjoyment – falls to bits. What worked perfectly yesterday in the sunshine on an easy and freshly groomed slope has now disappeared as the light goes flat and the run becomes steep and bumpy. Each fall turns into the next fall until you finally arrive at the bottom, weary and wet.

To improve, you need expert help from a specialist ski school and a change in approach. Your skiing can be turned around in just a weekend of tuition, and transformed within a week. It’s never too late to progress and it’s a myth that only complete beginners need lessons.

France

I particularly recommend Top Ski in Val d’Isère (www.topskival.com), which runs regular ski clinics in conjunction with tour operators Directski (www.directski.com) and Le Ski (www.leski.com).

Look for a resort with plenty of confidence-building pistes. Courchevel and Méribel are part of one Europe’s most enjoyable ski circuits with an abundance of long and flattering runs covering 600km of piste and served by 167 lifts.  What puts the Trois Vallées ski-lengths ahead of its rivals is the variety of its mainly intermediate skiing.

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Austria

Kitzbühel’s Ski Safari offers an enjoyable range of pistes that takes you from the famous Hahnenkamm all the way along the Kitzbühel valley. Anyone with a couple of weeks’ ski experience can manage the outing, which consists of a series of blue and gentle red runs linked by lifts. From this winter Kitzbühel is linked by gondolas to Westendorf and the SkiWelt area to create an undulating playground of 150 lifts and over 400km of piste. My hotel of choice in Kitzbühel is the Weisses Rössl with a two-storey spa and an indoor swimming-pool.

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USA

Heavenly (Reno/San Francisco airports), which straddles the border between California and Nevada is a contrastingly different ski area with major intermediate appeal. Its 27 lifts cover 4,800 acres of terrain with dramatically different views of Lake Tahoe on one side of the mountain and the parched Nevada Desert on the other. Tahoe Lakeshore Lodge & Spa is an unusual place to stay on the South Shore, with a view of the lake from every room.

Killington (Boston airport) in Vermont is closer to home with virtually guaranteed cover thanks to the most sophisticated snowmaking system on the planet. Vermont Inn is an 1840s farmhouse 10 miles out of Killington, offering individually decorated rooms, some with fireplaces or hot tubs.

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