I crippled my grandmother when I first tried skiing, and it was all downhill after that
I’ve never caught the ski bug and I never will. I’d far rather slope off somewhere nice and hot
From time to time, I worry that I’m a bit of a killjoy in this column. A right old Victoria Meldrew. I grumble about leaf blowers, I tell you that you mustn’t wear the wrong sort of wellington boots and can only have curtains, not shutters, in your house. I’m not sure there’s anything in the world that I feel more belligerent towards than skiing, though.
Is there a sillier sport? Golf is pretty silly and the Finns like a spot of wifecarrying, but getting on a rickety lift that may well give you vertigo purely so that you can slide down a perilously steep and icy slope with a pair of oversized knitting needles strapped to your feet? Doing that again and again, multiple times a day, the only solace a piece of melted cheese and a cornichon the size of a paracetamol for lunch? Come on, admit it, it is very silly indeed. And the boots! My God, those boots. Those are the wrong sort of boots entirely. It would be more comfortable to force one’s toes into a pair of breeze blocks every morning.
There’s an awful lot of skiing about at the moment, what with the Winter Olympics having started and Instagram full of people beaming from the top of a mountain. They look like they’re having a good time, but I don’t believe they can be.
I first went skiing when I was a rotund 13-year-old. After wobbling to the top of Val d’Isère’s nursery slope on a button lift (hateful invention), I immediately toppled onto my grandmother, then a very elegant and chic 60-something who had skied beautifully all her life. She hurt her hip in the fall and never slalomed again.
Matters did not improve. I left ski school after three days because, while my class was progressing, I was not. I hated falling over, I hated the noise my knitting needles made when they skittered over a patch of ice, I hated the churning of my stomach as the funicular climbed and the Frenchmen around me, dressed as if regulars on Ski Sunday, rushed towards the doors when they opened.
I hated the three-year-olds who zipped past my legs, I hated the temperature, I hated taking half an hour to get undressed for a pee, and another half an hour to put all those layers back on again. And I really, really hated anyone who suggested “One more run before lunch?”
I’ve tried skiing two or three times since, and have wondered every time if this would be the trip on which I caught the bug. Nope.
The only positives are the views and the hot chocolate, and I can get both of those things from my local park, so I don’t see much point in spending £9 billion on a ski pass and a lumpy chalet bed for a week. Especially when there’s a high chance of ripping a ligament on day one.
A certain member of my family has a theory that skiing is exercise for people who barely move for the rest of the year; that they justify being idle toads for 51 weeks on the basis that they slip down a snowy hill for the other one and don’t stop talking about it for the next 11 months. Perhaps.
I also suspect that, at this point in the calendar, there are those of us who long for hot holidays and the sensation of sun on our milky limbs, and there are the sickos who want to go abroad somewhere even colder, where they’ll have to wear more clothing. I know which camp I’m in. Don’t even get me started on the Cresta.