THIS week's column could have been so very different.

On Sunday afternoon I sat down with the laptop and considered a subject.

The idiosyncratic architecture of Antoni Gaudi? The enduring appeal of Elgar?

With hot coffee at my side, a Jack Russell snoozing in the armchair and the darts playing quietly on the TV in the corner, I was ready to pontificate.

Then the phone went.

It was my niece, inviting us on a family outing, an outing to Dartmoor for sledging and snowballing.

What a choice.

But despite the pull of the warm fireside, the coffee and the darts, I couldn't compete with the beseeching looks of Mrs H and Younger Daughter, both of whom are snow and ice enthusiasts.

We were soon on the way out through Bovey Tracey in convoy and up on to the moor.

From a distance, the slopes below Hay Tor looked like an ant hill, with little figures toiling up the snowy incline, and more little figures pelting back down again.

Up close, it looked much the same, apart from the fact that Hay Tor itself had disappeared into the low cloud.

We parked among the 4x4s and set off up the slope.

I have to say here and now that I have never been so cold in my life. I may have under-dressed, with insufficient layers, and by the time we got to the top I was shaking visibly.

But the family showed no mercy.

Unlike some of the ants scurrying up and down the grassy hill, we had not invested heavily in state-of-the-art sledging kit.

Between us we had three garden trays and a bodyboard. Readers with longer memories may recall that this was the bodyboard that almost killed me at Newquay once, spitting me out into a great tumbling wave that must have been all of two feet tall. I surfaced many yards away, spitting seaweed, sand and salty water.

I thought I should have ended up in an episode of Seaside Rescue, but it never happened.

Anyway, the sledging began. Mrs H, Younger Daughter, Sister-in-Law, Niece, Middle Nephew and Youngest Nephew all took their turns on various different slopes.

The last time I was at Hay Tor it was a blazing summer day. This time it was dramatic, with its crags and contours softened by snow and the views out across the moors limited by the low cloud.

In my role as official photographer I stayed at the top and gradually froze into one spot as the rest of the family went up and down.

Younger Nephew, seated inside a plastic garden tray, took a heavy tumble when he found the only rock on the slope.

He clambered back to the top of the hill announcing quite boldly and cheerfully that he thought he might have damaged his cheese and crackers. I thought he meant he had somehow impaired his packed lunch, but on reflection I think it was some kind of primary school playground rhyming slang.

He seemed to recover fairly quickly, though, and was soon back on the downhill slide.

There were some people sliding on estate agency boards, and some on dustbin lids. Some had rugs and plastic bags. One had the parcel shelf from a hatchback car.

One man swept nonchalantly down the hill on a kind of silver bicycle on skis. One swept by on a slinky little fibreglass number specifically designed for days like these. He glanced across at us as he sped by with a look which could only be described as 'contemptuous'.

Another family had a beautiful hand-made wooden toboggan with a woven seat and the word 'Austria' carefully scorched into the timber.

At one stage we all stepped back out of the way as a blue canoe roared down the hill, carrying several young men of the university student type.

Their projectile was easily the fastest thing on the hill all afternoon, and would have taken out almost everyone else if it hadn't been for the simple common sense etiquette of seeing them coming, getting out of the way and giving them a big cheer when the canoe deposited them in the gorse.

Some snowboarders showed off their skills and numerous dogs rushed around wagging their tails and yapping as if all their Christmases had come at once.

Mrs H had finally persuaded me that the only way to keep warm was to put down the camera, forget that I am nearly 50 years old and keep sledging.

And I was getting pretty good at going down the hill head-first on one of the gardening trays.

By lifting the feet well clear of the ground you can gain prodigious speed, and if you are really clever you can steer by shifting your body weight or, in emergencies, digging a foot into the ground behind you.

Not being really clever, I am still nursing the bruises from my own encounter with Cheese and Crackers Rock. I did manage to save my amidships area from serious damage by reaching my hand out in front of me and fending off the rock, but the upshot was a painful blow on the hand, a swift parting of the ways between large ginger bloke and garden tray, and a long walk down the hill to retrieve the errant tray.

On Monday morning I discovered bruises in numerous areas.

The best descent of the afternoon for me came in tandem with Younger Daughter. She sat at the front of the bodyboard, steering and doing the skilful stuff. I sat at the back, providing ballast and going 'wheeeeeee!'.

We gathered speed over the snow and frozen grass, bumping past the rest of the family, who smiled thinly in the kind of way that says 'this is going to end in tears'.

In fact we gathered so much speed through careful steering and unstoppable momentum that it seemed for a moment that we might not stop until we got to Ilsington, with barely time for a snifter at the Rock on the way through.

Fortunately a gorse bush intervened. We plunged heavily into a hollow just before the bush and pulled up sharply in among the prickly spines.

My hat had come off somewhere back up the slope, and my gloves were for some reason packed full of snow on the inside and bristling with bits of gorse on the outside. It was a moment or two before we got our breath back.

Then when we did, we couldn't stop laughing.

The bodyboard, the very one which tried to kill me in the Cornish surf, lay forlorn and broken in the powdery snow.

It was irreparably damaged, its spine broken inside its plastic covering.

But it's the way it would have wanted to go.

And it was a great run, gold medal standard we thought.

Surely, if the Winter Olympics can feature fruitcake sports like freestyle skiing and yawn-fests like ice dancing, there must be room for simply hurling yourself down a snowy slope on a body board.

Towards the end of the afternoon, with the dusk gathering and the headlights of cars visible in the valley far down below the edge of the moor, the air ambulance landed down by the road in a billow of powdery snow.

I was by now colder than I could ever have imagined, and even a Thermos cup of coffee and a chocolate finger couldn't restore my core temperature.

And still the ants kept on climbing up and sliding down.

Eventually we left them to it and drove home for a warm-up.

Thanks family, what a brilliant afternoon.

Sorry Guideliners, but Gaudi and Elgar will just have to wait for another time.