Every once in a blue moon, whatever that is, I seem to have a strange yearning to do something that is somewhere betwixt the extreme and the just plain stupid.

That includes 'land' parascending at North Weald Aerodrome (and a nasty accident that day put 4 people in hospital), gliding days, walking on the seabed off Mauritius with 40lb weights around my waist and flying lessons in an old Piper. So far, I've managed to avoid parachuting, bungee jumping, swimming with sharks, more recently walking on white hot coals (for charity of course) and then a real dream, The Cresta Run at St Moritz.

Maybe it's the blue moon that makes me do it.

There was certainly a Full Moon with a mountain bluish hue when we spent another great week at my favourite ski area, Les Trois Vallees in France with the John Lewis Ski Club at Les Menuires.

And what a terrific bunch they are, the Partners and their partners – 54 of us!

So, on the 3rd or 4th day, at least half of us were enjoying one of the real pleasures of skiing, an alfresco lunch in a mountain restaurant, and as we all sat on the balcony decks lounging in the ironic heat, way up in the cloudless sky was a tiny orange speck of a distant loony (or two) paraskiing down into the valley.

It's a sight often seen in the mountains and is usually viewed either with a little envy and "wow, I'd love to do that" together with "but I don't think so, somehow" or more often than not, with a "bleedin' idiot, never get me up there".

It was about 12:30pm, we'd ordered lunch and I thought that a quick visit to the Les Toilettes was needed which, as all skiers know well, is not an easy task is clambering down near vertical, slippery stairs in ski boots.

In this case, the stairs went down to the open piste and I had to walk into the front of the restaurant to visit Les Loos but it was on the way back that was my real undoing.

As I walked across the snow towards the stairs to clamber back up to lunch, I spotted a tiny sign on a post opposite the piste that read 'Paraskiing Ici'

Hmm…intrigued, I wandered across towards the little sign and before you could say "don't do it, plonker" I was verbally pounced upon by a youngish French chap who rather quickly persuaded me that it was really quite safe.

Et voila - I was booked in.

I was to meet him at the little sign at 2:00pm and we would become that tiny orange speck high in the sky for everyone to point at. I climbed back up the stairs to the rejoin the lunching Partners and sheepishly told my wife and 2 friends what I'd done.

Worryingly, she and all the rest of the crowd thought this was a real hoot, that I was totally bonkers and that everyone would certainly be positioned somewhere on the ski area at 2:30ish to see my act of foolishness, no doubt waving and shouting sarcastically, albeit from 2000 feet below.

One of the slight problems with paraskiing that I had identified in the past is that it usually seemed a little anti-social in that to reach the mountain peak that you intend jumping off can take 40 or 50 minutes on the lifts and then once you have completed the jump you descend way below the main ski area – so you can almost say goodbye to your friends for the rest of the afternoon.

Of course, if it all went wrong, you could say goodbye permanently.

The other little problem is that you need to perform this act of idiocy without your ski poles as it's too dangerous to land with them (and spearing yourself on landing is, apparently, bad for busines) so you need to leave them somewhere near your landing area or with someone who can join you there – or ski back to the hotel on your own, poleless!

Luckily, the landing area was to be the tiny village of Motteret which has a couple of little alfresco bars and, importantly, was a 15 minute ski run down from the restaurant where we were having lunch and where I was becoming increasingly a little nervous.

This meant that my wife, Sue, and a friend could carry my poles, ski down the run way below the take-off point, watch the take-off from a distance, wave, laugh, wet themselves then ski down to Motteret and watch the landing – then straight into one of the bars for an extremely deserved drink!

1:30pm came and I ordered a rather large Cognac to sip with my after-lunch coffee and all the rest of the crowd clattered off to join their skis, some with the odd "good luck" and others with the more perverse "it was nice knowing you".

2:00pm arrived and we wandered across to meet my French chum whose name I then discovered was Christian and the thought of a quick prayer immediately came to mind but I thought better of mentioning it.

Then, far too casually for my liking, the girls skied off carrying my poles to a point about 500 feet down on the next piste where Christian had said they'd have a good view of the impending flight.

He threw the giant rucksack over his shoulder and we skied down towards a very narrow ledge on the side of the mountain, perhaps 30 feet wide with a sheer drop of about 300 feet below us and just over 3000 feet to the eventual landing area.

He undid the oversize rucksack and out fell the parachute in the form of a 'canopy', perhaps 30 feet wide and 10 feet across which he then slowly and carefully rolled out onto the ledge about 10 feet from the drop point.

Worryingly, he seemed to have great trouble untangling the endless ropes but eventually the whole contraption was laid out perfectly and although I hadn't a clue what I was looking at, I spent quite a few minutes nervously searching for any suspicious tangle.

I know this chap has never made a mistake before (because he was alive!) but there's always a first time and I would rather it wasn't with me.

All ready to go and Christian helped me put on the harness and asked me to stand on the edge with my skis together overhanging this stupid drop by about a foot.

He attached himself to the chute (note I'd got the lingo by now!) and then stood behind me with his skis outside of mine, attached himself to me via two terrifyingly small D-clips and calmly said "Ok David, I will count to 3 and I want you to lean forward".

He counted to just 2 and somewhat dishonestly leant forward himself, thus pushing me forward…and down we went, almost a sheer drop, faster and faster for perhaps 80 or 90 feet, arguably the most frightening moment of my life and in those few seconds I had mentally changed this chap's name to something far less Christian than Christian.

The ropes followed us down and the chute followed the ropes and, at last, the chute opened wrenching my shoulders back causing me to have a sharp intake of breath together with one or two other instant bodily functions.

And oddly, having gone down so fast, we were now UP…and flying like a bird.

Almost immediately Christian showed off his aerobatic skills and with a sharp tug on the left cord we dive-bombed in that direction, followed by a right hand tug and a sharp right hand turn.

Within a few seconds, Christian shouted and pointed to a point where two pistes met and there, standing and waving manically were the girls and, using another of his tricks, we whooshed down low over their heads for a Kodak moment then continued our descent down into the valley below.

It seemed odd that as we descended the higher we got, which was of course true as the ground was falling away faster than we were and I began to realise that we were actually flying. Not only was the ground dropping away into the valley, but we were occasionally lifted by the thermals.

At one point my driver told me that we were going to head for the forest above Mirabel and it was quite extraordinary to see the whole vast area as a blanket of white with a small dark greeny/black patch approaching, where as I was soon to discover that the air is a great deal warmer than over the snow.

As we flew over the forest, the warm air thermal shot us skywards by three or four hundred feet – rather too quickly for my liking.

I think it was at this point that two rather worrying notions swept though my mind.

One was that, although Christian was totally strapped in and firmly attached to the parachute, I was attached to him by two pathetic clips and just dangled freely in the air, so I stopped holding on to my harness and took a firm grip of his.

Also, it was at this point that I thought that perhaps my Travel Insurance didn't quite cover such adventures and quickly concluded that there was absolutely nothing I could do about it so I pushed it immediately out of my mind.

I did briefly think that I could take off my gloves, tuck them down my front, carefully remove my Insurance card from an inner pocket and my mobile from another and call the buggers in London for an instant upgrade, but quickly thought better of it.

The entire descent was, apparently, 3000 feet and we were at almost any given point about 1000 feet up – allowing for the odd up and down in the thermals.

Eventually, there was Motteret slowly approaching (or rather we it!) and I could see the 2 or 3 restaurants crowded with skiers, many I'm sure looking up as us with very amusing and less than polite thoughts.

To the right of the village ahead of us was a slalom run and to the left of that run was, I was told, our designated landing point and our plan was, as Christian shouted in my ear, to swing left to right over the village restaurants and then travel straight towards the slalom run thus landing uphill to the left of the piste – safely away from the other skiers.

We flew majestically to the left, then veered in a perfect arc to the right, across the restaurants (just to show off!) and headed upwards towards the downhill slalom run and then neatly edged over to the left ready to land gracefully on the uphill slope.

And as the land shot up towards us I dutifully dropped my skis neatly and flatly on the fast rising piste, then stupidly caught an inside edge and the two us literally crashed headlong into the snow with skis, glasses, hats and God know what else flying everywhere.

How that must have looked to the on-looking audience in the restaurants down below.

But other than ego, nothing was damaged and within a few seconds we were both piddling ourselves with laughter as I scrambled around the snow looking for my bits!

Christian immediately began collecting up his parachute and repacking his rucksack, and with a swift Au Revoir I began stepping my way down the slope towards the waiting girls who I guessed had seen the less than graceful end to our flight.

And, as I had promised myself, we headed straight for one of the restaurants for a very serious, rather large and well-deserved drink.

And paraskiing?

It was truly memorable, but I think it was also a one-off.

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Incidentally, a blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have 12 full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those 12 full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly 1.1 days. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (on average about every 2.7154 years) there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a "blue moon." Anyone the wiser?

From the 'never to be published' book, THE RAMBLINGS OF AN ORDINARY BLOKE