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Dylan Thomas couldn't remember if it snowed for six days and six nights when he was twelve years old or for twelve days and twelve nights when he was six. Equally, he also thought that when he was a child there were wolves running around the white hills of 1920s Swansea. This is what too much sitting in bars in Soho does to your memory.

But, then again, maybe it's snow itself that does the funny thing to your sense of recall. I have friends who go skiing every year. Thus they're happy to dress in the kind of Day-Glo romper suits otherwise worn by Californian Hippy jugglers. They go to France and Austria to spend wads of money on a room in a concrete bunker, and for food that tastes as if Railtrack got the contract for catering in Wormwoods Scrubs. They stand in queues for hour on freezing hour in return for a few minutes of tumbling down slopes chock full of other romper-suited clowns. They invariably end up head down in a snow drift with their knees entwined like pretzels, whilst skiers, (from nations where skiing is a reality and not an aspiration), use their recumbent and hypothermic bodies as moguls. This malarkey goes on for the whole 'holiday,' (if they manage to stay out of hospital, that is). Yet, when they finally crutch themselves back home, limp-ligamented, racoon-eyed from wearing goggles in Alpine sun and having trashed the value of a small car in busted ski equipment, all that my friends can recall is they had 'a brilliant time.' Truthfully, chionomania really messes up the mind.

It's the same for me; I can't remember anything about snow with any reliability. I mean, there was some time in the 60s when I was about six and snow coated the land like that dodgy foam insulation that cowboy builders are always keen to fill your loft with. But colder, and whiter, and outside-er. I spent days whizzing down a small hill on a sledge and trudging back up the slope again. Days! Futility is neither a word nor a concept that exists for small boys. Adults, though, should know better.

Snow came and went in the succeeding years. In my teens I got caught in a white-out halfway across the Wicklow mountains in January. The full whirly 'storm of Styrofoam inside a ping-pong ball' deal. I couldn't tell down from up, let alone figure out the cardinal points of that compass I wasn't carrying. But I did remember a trick for following a straight line in just such conditions which I�d read about in the SAS survival guide, or a Jack London story. Or the Beano. I spent an hour throwing my black, woolly hat to the edge of visibility (not far), walking to it and picking it up, and then doing the whole thing again, and again. And again, and again until I finally popped out at Sally Gap or some such place.

And there was the time that four of us drove from London to the Borders for a Hogmanay party and spotted a flank of the Cheviots eiderdowned in deep snow. So we took the plastic cover off the car's spare wheel to use as a makeshift sleigh, climbed to the ridge and pushed off. Excellent. Except for the wheel cover slipping out from under David, leaving him as a sort of human bobsleigh straddled by the rest of us. His shirt, jumper and jacket rode up around his neck and as we gained speed seven layers of epidermis were rapidly scoured off his back by the crystalline snows. Then the blood started. Staining the snow for 50 yards or so until we ground to a halt in the valley. Dave didn't feel real, not real pain until what was left of his frozen flesh thawed out in the warmth of the car.

In Algeria in the early 80s, more than halfway across the Sahara, hitchhiking and walking, I decided to do a quick peak bag of Mount Tahat's 2,918 meters. Whatever else I expected as I climbed, it wasn't a sudden temperature drop and snow shrapnel and pellets of hail gunning me down. Not whilst I was dressed in light cotton and sunglasses and could clearly see a camel in the sands far below.

And only a few years later I was renting the cheapest (because it was free) and most ramshackle house in the German Black Forest. The first snows fell and I discovered that the cottage was overpriced. Meagre heat and a thimbleful of hot water were supplied by a Neolithic wood burning stove that would have consumed the Schwartzwald in its entirety if I�d only had the energy to chop it all into logs. I spent hours every day collecting twigs like some Brueghel peasant, and began eyeing up municipal furniture and garden fences in terms of their BTUs. My friends trolled off to the heights to go skiing daily, but then they had central heating and Niagaras of hot water to return to. I could only see skiing as a perversion, akin to unnatural practises with small, furry animals. Though, obviously, much, much colder. I wouldn't have skied then, even if you threatened to nail planks of wood to my feet, shovel ice down my pants and push me off a cliff. But, duh, hang on! That is skiing, right. Being my point, exactly.

I came to view snow as a childish medium played in by people who didn't know enough to fly south with the onslaught of winter, and who thought that the word chalet was a byword for sophistication rather than project housing in wintery lands, and that apr�s ski was the equivalent of a Stones tour with unlimited tequila rather than a Gallic animateur lining people up to dance the 'Birdy Song' whilst the Teutonic countries got rid of substandard wine by boiling it up with sugar and calling it gl�-wine .

But how are the mighty fallen. I finally skied at an age when falling over, let alone wearing Polyester all-in-ones, is ill-advised. A Dutch girlfriend (what do the Dutch know about skiing? A fair bit, it turned out, in her case) took me off to Poland to lose my slopes virginity. I agreed on the Tatra mountains as a destination for two reasons - it was cheap, and I certainly wasn't prepared to pay over the odds for humiliation, and there was no chance of meeting anybody I knew. I didn't bargain, though, on both loving skiing and actually being able to do it. Well, sort of do it. A few hours on the kiddie slopes sorting out the planks and poles part and I was off up Kasprowy for the black runs. It's true that I wasn't skiing with any great style. Rather I tackled it as winter hill walking with the handicap of having skis tied to my boots. But there was the occasional blast of perfect downhilling to compensate for the 'clown with big shoes trying to tango' act that I had perfected and I was hooked.

After that there were other trips to the Tatras in succeeding winters. Then a salutary trip to the Austrian Tirol with a local friend who had skied from birth and was frankly cruel in her efforts to get me to ski like a member of the human race. There was a surreal day on mismatched hire skis in Morocco's Atlas mountains, where parties of French ex-pats pretended they were in Courchevel, despite the indignity of being carted up the slopes on the 'Berber ski-lift,' a line of trudging mules.

And I tried more snow and ice stuff. Whole seasons of cross-country ice-skating across the Netherlands - on tochts that joined 70 kms of windmill touring into one lung-busting afternoon of slide, kick, slide, kick; or sent one from Delft to Vlaardingen to buy a certain kind of biscuit - ijsmoppen - that tradition decreed should be carried back to ones delighted household stuffed down ones socks; or just lazy days waltzing along with friends across a landscape doubled in size by the freezing of the country's meers, ditches, canals and rivers.

I went dog sledding with Slovenia's champion 'musher.' Or, more accurately, I sat in a frozen forest as the doughty dogger shot past me at irregular intervals, seemingly out of control, as his Formula One pooches ate up the snowy miles on endless and brakeless laps of a 6 kms circuit, until the hounds finally panted to a halt and we went off to a pub for the rest of the night.

And I gave cross-country skiing a number of shots. I perserved with this one, despite my innate feeling that skiing on the level rather missed the point, in the way that, say, roller-skating across sad dunes, might be said to have missed the point. So I trudged across a fair number of wintery scenes on skis like toothpicks, plying the poles with vigour, aiming for distant villages and far off bars. I synchronised my trot and skid progress to the rhythm of an endlessly muttered mantra of 'this (pant) is (puff) ludicrous (gasp),' and battered miles out of myself and the landscape through sheer bloody-mindedness. But, I can't say I enjoyed it much.

Okay, maybe I hadn't really got comfortable with snow and ice and cold. I was still heading for deserts and equator hugging lands far more often than to the nations of the 'moon boot' and hot chocolate. If I was going to become a child of the snows, drastic measures were called for, and some lateral thinking.

I went to Finland. In midwinter. My thinking was that the Finns were probably professional when it came to snow, less amateurishly enthusiastic than the snow drizzled Alps or Sierras of southern countries. Correct. But all three of the guidebooks I carted to Kuopio in Finland's centre were worrisome about the Finn's dour and depressively taciturn moods in winter. The books all had those highlighted info boxes, (the kind that warn of the dangers of malaria or bandits for other lands), pointing out that one was in for a gloomy time in Finland, amongst silent types at one with the wolverine and the elk but none too good at fun and conversation.

I asked all the Finns who were detailed to show me the pleasures of every snow predicated activity from snowmobiling to snowboarding via langlaufen, horse riding, skating, down hilling and saunas, about this national dourness. In every case these gloomy recluses launched into vigorous discussion, roping in passers-by to add their views, opening bottles of schnapps (kipis, terveydeksi and h�lkyn k�lkyn - all words for 'cheers' - were the first words of Finnish I learnt) and generally making an unholy row before conceding that maybe it was true, that they were quiet, shy, retiring folk.

Be that as it may, the Finns knew about snow. Their snowmobiling was out and out fun, in the way that unecologically sound things often are. What I�d imagined would be like driving a sit-on lawnmower round in circles turned out to be the equivalent of joy riding in a forested Moss Side. "J�r, we disconnect the speedometers because people get obsessed with seeing how fast they're going and then...paf...they run into a tree, but you were going 90 kph or more," they told me.

The Icelandic horses that Jari lined up for us, were basically quadruped snowmobiles - tolting through snowdrifts that came up to their withers without a break in speed. Whilst he guy who took me downhill skiing sorted out my style problems within an hour and then left me to shoosh down the floodlit slopes until late at night. Next, skates were produced so that I could skitter over a part of the course that would carry Lycra skinned speed-skaters on a 200 kms race the next day. There was no opportunity for winter fun passed by, amongst the Finns.

The Finns sum themselves up under the 'three Ss - Sibelius, sisu and sauna.' The dreamy composer I could understand, and the sauna, as well. Sisu, though, translated as 'guts,' and was exactly what you needed for their sauna experience. A bunch of us shucked off our clothes after a blow-out feast of elk stew, raw minnows and Arctic cloudberry liquor, and heated ourselves up in a dark steamy wooden box. It was -15� in the snowy night outside, and Arto's insistence that we should all frolic down to the lake for a quick plunge seemed purely sadistic. But after a previous night in Kuopio's tango bar where we gloomed as noisily and wildly as possible, anything seemed possible. But even Arto seemed discomfited by the fact that the hole in the ice had frozen solid within half an hour of being opened. Starkers, he battered away at it with a baulk of timber, opening up a tiny plunge pool, into which we all plunged.

But the thing I wanted to sort out was the cross-country skiing lark. I was delivered to the tender mercies of Reijo Vornanen, a cardiovascular miracle in tracksuit bottoms and a rucksack, and with national and international medals to prove it. Well, the first thing I learnt was that my previous attempts at cross-country skiing across raw snow had been the equivalent of roller-skating sand dunes. What you need are the prepared parallel tracks like tramlines to slot your skis into. Kuopio has hundreds of kilometres of them, through the woods, across lakes and over hills. Laying these tracks, even at 90 kph on the specially adapted snowmobile, must be one of the most mind numbingly boring jobs short of counting reindeer, in the whole of Finland.

So you can't blame the track layers for their little jokes. Even the jape that got me, once I had the basic improved technique under control and set off for a circuit of the slopes and woods around the Hotel Puijo. Shooting down hill through a corridor of trees, picking up speed, skis firmly locked into the grooves I suddenly realised, at terminal velocity, that the jolly track layer had amused himself by the turning of at an abrupt right angle. He would have been gratified by the sight of me of continuing straight ahead and, arms and poles windmilling, plunging down a slope and headfirst into a plumped up snowdrift.

It wasn't enough to discourage me. I spent the afternoon perfecting stops and turns, and was ready next day to join a group for a more ambitious tour. Under a sparkling blue sky, with ice crystals hanging in the air like shards of diamond, we set of across the lakes, passing the odd solitary and silent Finn dangling a fishing line into a hole augered through the ice like some bundled up garden gnome. We passed cabins on islands and boats frozen into small bays. Birds sang between chattering beaks. We skimmed along like Northern gods. And returned, after 20 kms or so, to a fire built in a snow hole barbecuing sausages, and swigs of savon wiina. The Finns had got snow sorted and they'd let me in on the secret. I think, but I can't remember. That's the trouble with snow, it affects your recall

I�d sort of got snow sorted. Well, almost. I may have got cross-country skiing under control, but then I tried snowboarding. Now that truly is an activity for children - they were zigzagging down the slopes with all the aplomb and baggy trousers of an adolescence spent skiving off school and fooling with skateboards and rap music. Attempts to imitate them turned me into a sad case of parents' day three-legged race contestant, tied to a plank for a partner, and spending most of the time skidding along on my chin and knees. But I know I can do it, if global warming just allows me � and everyone else � enough snow.

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