Skiing holidays? They drive me up the pole

THERE WAS a time when only two products were advertised on TV at this time of year: partwork magazines and package holidays. I still see commercials pleading with me to begin a commitment to 478 weekly instalments that will eventually turn into a valuable reference work that my family will treasure for ever, but hardly any for package holidays — they seem to have taken a holiday of their own.

My friend Moshe used to take his family to half-built hotels in Benidorm for two weeks every summer, but has long since given up this kind of all-in vacation. He now describes himself as a free spirit, refusing to be limited to a single location. He’s a world traveller and wants to go to the more remote places; places where he’s not restricted to a whitewashed box room and a swimming pool overcrowded with a scream of children (a “scream” being the collective noun for under-eights).

That’s right, Moshe owns a caravan. He has even taken it to Wales.

He once, and only once, asked if I would like to go caravanning with him. I was horrified at the suggestion. “Peasants we may have been,” I said curtly, “but never gypsies”. It was only on later reflection that I realised that we have, indeed, been travellers for much of our history.

Here’s the thing about caravans: why would anyone want to spend their holiday living in worse conditions than they have at home? A caravan, like camping, is not a holiday for a Jew. Caravanning is about as close a Jew gets to what Ranulph Fiennes does, and I doubt he describes his trips as holidays.

Which brings me neatly onto skiing. I’ve never quite understood why Jews enjoy skiing holidays. Jews and mountains have not sat comfortably together since the Lord told the Israelites that only Moses should ascend Sinai to pick up the holy handbook. What does a Jew need with a mountain? It’s much easier to develop property on level ground.

Furthermore, skiing requires an enormous amount of physical effort, and that’s just to get dressed. And for what? To schlep up a mountain in the most uncomfortable shoes ever designed, simply for the purpose of coming back down the mountain while trying to avoid getting hurt?

If caravanning is a reminder of what we did when we were thrown out of the Pale, then skiing is a reminder of the conditions we endured when we were allowed to live there. Do we long for a return to that?

And let’s not forget the danger associated with skiing. I mean, of course, the danger of missing lunch. With a beach holiday, or to be precise, a private-hotel beach holiday, there’s no danger of not hearing the bell calling guests for lunch. How is this possible on top of a mountain? A Jew could starve in such remote and extreme conditions.

There’s only one reason a Jew goes skiing. He goes because it’s expensive and pointless. It’s a way of telling people how successful he is. Nothing reeks of success more than wasting your money on something everyone knows you don’t want to do.

The truth is no Jew actually skis, they just go on skiing holidays. That means they wake up late in the morning, eat enormous quantities of carbohydrates in preparation of the day ahead, then spend an hour getting their clobber on, after which they clomp to the ski-lift, clamber out at the cafe midway up the mountain and stay there eating cake and drinking hot chocolate until the last lift leaves to go back down.

Moshe went skiing a couple of years back but has vowed never to go again. He caused absolute havoc and received a hefty fine for getting stuck halfway up one of the slopes. Well, he should never have tried taking his caravan up there in the first place.