The best trips teach you something, even if it is only a few Mexican dance steps or how to do Compostage des Billets. But I have a particular weakness for being formally taught rather than picking things up. Some of the best holidays I ever had were physically or mentally quite strenuous, as I willingly revert to the status of a somewhat unpromising pupil. There is something inspiring about going away to learn something.

Part of the attraction is being taught by a local. It beds you into the country faster than anything else. Where's the fun in taking your own British ski instructor, for instance? All they know is the right way to bend your knees. Ski with a proper Austrian, Swiss or Norwegian and you learn the stories of the mountain, the legends of trolls or Krampus, the local lore of avalanche and blizzard.

Go white-water rafting on the Dalaman river and an authoritative Turk takes charge of you and lectures you about the environmental evils of dams as you hurl yourself from side to side and dig the paddle in. Canoe the rapids of the Athabasca, as we did, under the command of a tough Canadian hunter, and you find yourself strangely thrilled as you obey his instructions to put mothballs round the tent at night and hang your food-box in a tree to deter marauding bears.

Even an Azorean taxi-driver guide can exert pleasing authority: in thick fog at the top of a mountain I suggested we go back down, but he said: “No-no! Mist will go soon. Best view of volcano. Is necessary that you see.” Ten minutes later he was proved right.

I suppose there are people who don't like being bossed around when they're on holiday, but I love it. Putting yourself under authority and instruction you discard your dull competent daily self and believe for a while that you hold untapped potential: there is a future again, as there was when you were a child.

One of my best trips ever involved signing on as a somewhat past-it cadet on the Norwegian square-rigger Staatsraad Lehmkuhl and racing through a North Sea gale: if you shout “Blue Watch 23!” at me even now, eight years later, I snap to attention and reply “Hoy!”.

The latest addiction is to the short learning break. These work best when you accept your limitations. Once you grasp that you will probably never be any good, there are any number of things to attempt under kindly instruction within the UK - hurdlemaking, carving decoy ducks, singing.

I am devoted to the ramshackle and ineffably artistic Flint House, in Broadstairs, where I first spent a blissful weekend painting an icon under Peter Murphy's tutelage (proper egg tempera, natural paints, rubbing gold-leaf down with an amethyst). The aim was not to become a painter of icons, but to understand them better.

The following year I signed up there with Martin Cheek the mosaic artist and became a slapdash mosaicist. I clipped tesserae for two days (sending shards everywhere), learnt what andamento means and created a startling owl with mad glass eyes of Venetian millefiori.

Part of the appeal, admittedly, is that sitting round a big table with glue and art materials and a teacher is exactly like being back at nursery school, only with coffee instead of milk. Let others lie in warm hammocks reverting to the womb. I revert to four years old instead, and life is good again.

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