Extortionate costs, queueing in the cold and potentially life-altering injuries? No thanks. And don’t get me started on the EDM après-ski hell

There comes a time in every middle-class or upwardly mobile person’s life when they will hear the following six words: “Would you like to come skiing?” My answer: absolutely not.

Skiing, I have come to believe, is the emperor’s new clothes of leisure pursuits: a collectively sustained fantasy. People insist it’s magical in the same way they insist that cold-water swimming is “transformative” or small plates are “better for sharing”. At some point we forgot to ask whether any of this is actually true.

Emma Loffhagen is a freelance commissioning editor and writer covering culture and lifestyle

Her YA classic was inspired by racism in 1990s Britain. A quarter of a century later, she talks about success, death threats and getting shoutouts from Tinie Tempah and Stormzy

‘I’m useless at this bit,” Malorie Blackman laughs, shifting awkwardly in a plum-coloured jacket and smart black trousers. It is a gloomy February evening in the back room of a theatre in west London, and she is having her photograph taken, the rain pummelling the brick outside.

Blackman is, by any reasonable metric, one of the most significant writers Britain has produced in the past quarter of a century – the closest thing my generation, who were raised on her books, has to a literary rockstar. And yet, she seems faintly baffled by the notion that the spotlight should rest on her for long. “I hate being in front of the camera!”