I’ve always wanted my kids to ski. It may be the least necessary skill on the parenting list — brush teeth, read, write, tie shoelaces, swim, ride bicycle, mix martini, ski — but whilst we’ve managed to tick most of everything else off — too-dry martinis notwithstanding — their lifetime absence from the slopes has filled me with guilt.

I got to ski as a child because my parents had money. I got to ski as an adult through performing stand-up comedy in the Alps, yet while those gigs were all-inclusive, they weren’t five kids and a wife inclusive.

Then with financial success receding as the children kept growing, the reality of a family ski trip grew ever fainter in proportion to my increasing sense of failure. Skiing has come to embody my inability as a parent to provide my offspring with the same material privileges that I enjoyed, especially after giving up on the hope of them ever owning personally monogrammed cutlery.

Then, a Christmas miracle! So to speak. As the only Jew in my job I was asked to work extra shifts Christmas Eve and Day, with a proper bonus on top. Which my wife agreed to on the proviso that we use the money to go away.

Then finding an amazing house and cheap flights to Norway, which turned out to have a ski slope five minutes’ walk through the garden, run by local volunteers also hiring out equipment, which was open a month earlier than usual this year because of the cold weather.

So it is that I found myself under the observation of bemused Norwegians, as I attempted to simultaneously instruct five children aged five to 13 to ski from scratch, by repeatedly screaming at them, “SNOWPLOUGH!”

It was homeschooling hell all over again; the teaching technique of just shouting the same thing over and over in the hope of discovering the specific pitch necessary for the lesson to supernaturally manifest, plus the lack of empathy or concern at their deteriorating emotional state in service to a greater good, and the running from one child to the next in an increasingly frenzied state, in this case like the opposite of a game of whack-a-mole where instead you have to pull them back up.

All with the additional danger provided of a mountain for them to fall off.

This was parental failure of a different kind, a classic case of be careful what you wish for, with a line from the Book of Isaiah repeatedly running through my head, “If your sins are like scarlet they will become white as snow.’”

Fearful of my sins becoming actual scarlet on the snow we eventually returned home, where on a whim I typed in “Jew” and “ski”.

Perhaps the debacle wasn’t my fault, after all what business do a desert people have in the snow? We weren’t like these Nordic types whose children skied out of the womb. Moses didn’t slalom down the mountain, stylishly swishing to a stop before the Golden Calf.

Google seemingly confirmed my deflection, with search results consisting solely of lots of photos of people living it up on expensive beach holidays. As I was trying to decode if the algorithms were being antisemitic, I then realised it’d just assumed that I’d misspelt “Jetski”.

Insisting that no, I definitely did mean Jew and ski, I was excited to discover a googlewhack where only one result is found. But it turns out Jewski is a facebook group for Canadian uni students, and then a nickname/slur for Russian Jews.

The third result will be this column.

I wish I could say it was Jewish resilience that got us all back to the training hill on day two, but it was more a heavy application of Jewish guilt. What got the kids actually skiing though was something that somehow seemed quite un-Jewish: letting go. Some very kind locals had decided to help us, probably out of pity for my children, and probably because they were scared of an avalanche from my bellowing.

They insisted that the best way to learn was instead at the top of the mountain. Being 100 per cent ready and safe was impossible, and the only way to ski down the mountain was to fall down it first.

As unforgivable as it is to make a cliched analogy of life being like a mountain, I guess with this one making the case for reincarnation, I did learn something in my combination of Jewish and Nordic teaching.

You can fight the mountain, with wobbly knees going against the grain to stay safe and in control. But it’s exhausting. Or you can lean into the mountain, let it guide you, and have fun. But I’m saving that lesson for when they’re older. Until then, “SNOWPLOUGH!”