The H Factor

Knock You Down - Keri Hilson, In A Perfect World

I am skiing again.  After 2008’s `hurrah my bonus has come in’ Christmas family trip to Austria, followed up by the 2009 `free work incentive, why the fuck not’ trip to France, I am once again back in France, this time on a `I don’t have a proper job’ budget trip with a group of friends.  `Budget’ means a 14-hour epic road trip across France in a Ford C-Max full of other people’s vomiting children, and staying in a self-catering chalet rather than one where a tanned, hot 24-year-old chalet boy welcomes you every morning with a full English breakfast and a winning smile.

Thankfully I am holidaying with a group of people who are highly proficient at whipping up a decent meal out of a few choice ingredients from the local alimentation generale, so we’re not reduced to eating £20 pizzas every night.  Wallet-wise, the Eurozone is a very painful place to be right now.

It would be reasonable to assume, of course, that all these ski trips are making me a more proficient skier.  But this would be a foolish assumption, because I am still utterly shite.  I have now taken my lack of co-ordination and graceless falling to steeper slopes, but I still suck badly.  My main issues are a) fear of speed and b) fear of going downhill, which means that I crawl like a lethargic tortoise across the piste, before making a turn and skiing back up again to a spot roughly six feet further down from where I started.  Many a ski instructor has been found scratching their head at my complete lack of ability in the skiing arena, clearly desperate to beat my useless arse down the slope with a ski pole while groups of brightly-clad 3-year-olds whip past me at high speed, often for the second or third time, the little fuckers.

I should probably give up this winter sport lark, in fairness, but being able to ski (however torturous my descent) allows me to explore the many lovely mountain top cafes, where one can lie in a deck chair in the sun with a £3 can of coke doing some high quality people watching.  For some reason this resort is particularly popular with Belgians, many of whom insist on wearing those all-in-one retro ski outfits sold by C&A in the 1980s, made from highly flammable parachute material and only available in vomit-inducing neon colours.  There are loads of them still around – yesterday I actually saw a grown man in a suit of green, yellow and pink triangles with stripes of fluorescent sunscreen on his face.  Clearly he has suffered some kind of brain injury that has left him wedged firmly in 1987 - I’ll bet good money there was a Global Hypercolour t-shirt under there somewhere.  Incidentally, his wife was dressed as Princess Diana skiing in Klosters in 1992, with a skin tight and shiny champagne-coloured all-in-one with roadkill fur collar, head band and massive camel toe.  Nice.

But hey, everybody knows that skiing is really all about the après-ski – all that twatting about down the mountain is just storing up calorie credits for several vin chauds and cocktails later.   A pity, therefore, that we appear to be in the only resort in the French Alps with no après-ski whatsoever - perhaps les Belgians don’t like to party and would rather stay in and watch Poirot or something.

Last night I went out with one of the girls in my group (we are the only two who are not responsible for small children and thus still awake at 9pm), only to discover that this resort has one bar open on a Friday night.  I say `bar’ - it was more a pizza restaurant with a bar, a pool table and an affection for the greatest hits of The Cranberries.

We had barely made it through the door before we had pool cues thrust into our hands by a couple of random Frenchmen who could neither speak English or, as it turned out, play pool.  The game was then highjacked by a local girl who bore a startling resemblance to Martina Navratilova, and an 8-year-old boy who decided he would quite like to join in too.  By the end pretty much everyone in the bar was taking a turn against les femmes Anglaises, but I am pleased to announce that we claimed the gold medal for Great Britain, downed a G&T each and made a swift exit from the French version of Twin Peaks in order to try out the alternative resort nightlife.  Alas, there wasn’t any, so we were forced to walk back to our chalet and drink a bottle or two of champagne on the balcony whilst discussing such highbrow topics as `worst shag ever’ and so forth.

I am sat on the same balcony now, nursing a throbbing champagne hangover and deciding whether to do a final few hours of rubbish skiing, or just lie here getting a suntan and filling my lungs with clean mountain air before getting back in the car tomorrow and heading back to Blighty.  I’m thinking the second option is safer – I may get a moment of final day reckless abandon and increase my speed to jogging pace, at which point I could well represent a lethal speed hazard to small children and bloody snowboarders.  Every cloud and all that.

See you back on the other side.