It doesn’t normally follow that one would undertake an activity where legs can be broken, heads split and fingers sliced off underfoot willingly, but the weather man promised us snow this week and has so far delivered only a dribble of dirty slush. So when we reached the ice rink in the border town of Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, we traded in our dribbly dirty slush for a solid hunk of ice. At least, I hope it was solid.

Lozz, the veteran among us with four previous visits to ice rinks (this was my first), got a little carried away with the need for speed and started swooshing up to Laura and I every lap and asking breathlessly ‘What was that then? Eight, nine seconds?’ ‘Um, I think about 4:54 actually.’ After this she resigned herself to trying icy pirouettes but soon strayed into the violent game of hockey in the centre of the rink and caused a domino-effect series of particularly impressive falls.

Meanwhile, back by the fence, Laura and I were clinging on for dear life. There’s something unnerving about teetering precariously on a paper-thin metal edge while dozens of Swiss maniacs tooting party blowers and wearing Santa hats fly past with no regard for the general uncoordination of others.

But it was all in all a successful, if chilly outing, with not a damaged limb or disfiguration to be spoken of, provided the Bulgarian exchange student’s dislocated shoulder can be classed as a minor surface wound.