Skiing

Imagine this – hundreds of oversexed females descending annually upon Hyde Park to seek out park-keepers, gardeners and walking-tour guides and gawk at them until they agree to plant some silver seeds of their own on the inside of their adorer’s wombs. Is there anywhere in the world where this actually happens? Indeed there is – on the piste.

Ski slopes are a melting pot of outdated oddities, the oddest and outdated of which are the four or five-decade-old men in red jumpsuits who guide lascivious women of all ages across the mountain by day, then slump like bronzed billy-goats at the bars of ‘apres-ski’ drinking holes at night waiting for them to appear and voluntarily repay the favour. Is there anything more clit-tingling than a sexegenarian who can still find their way about the place? Apparently not. Being a ski instructor is the qualificatory equivalent of being a London cabbie, except instead of the rather sprawling Knowledge you’ve got to familiarise yourself with a simplified version of the Tube Map where the only direction is down. Am I missing something here? What the fuck is so impressive about that? In fact, girls, I’ll wager you’d have far more fun romping with a park-keeper than you would an ageing ski-guide. You could work on cultivating the tricky discipline of florae-recognition as you bounced. Blood-drop Emlets, Spring Cinquefoil, Pleated Snowdrop. The best you’re going to get with Jacques from ESF is ‘snowflake, snowball…uuh...snowman?’

It’s true of skiers, period. A piece of advice for you all: never, ever, brag about skiing. It is the capstone of hollow vanity, the antithesis of substance and talent. As a friend recently remarked, the best skiers are just the ones that have done the most skiing. It’s as mindlessly simple as that. And the ones that have done the most skiing are usually just the ones who were taken on skiing holidays when they were kids, which means they sat at ‘children’s tables’ until they were fourteen and probably still demand ‘frites!’ as an accompaniment to anything consumable.

Middle-class, middle-brow middle-earth. Yea, skiing is all of these things, but it’s something else as well. It is humiliating. You might not feel humiliated, but that’s your own fault. Take a step back and have a better look – every method of transport available to the skier is designed to make him look silly. Flying chairs, claustrophobic floating eggs, microphone stands dragging everyone up a hill by the bollocks. The button-lift masquerade looks to me like dozens of fawning minions, dressed as different kinds of fruit, refuelling an unseen iron Yeti. And then there’s the skis themselves, or, more specifically, the boots that clip into them. Suddenly, like the Tin-Man, you have to turn your whole body if you want to face something. Somehow locking your ankles in one position automatically causes the neck to cease functioning properly. Everybody on the mountain looks like they’re trying to casually walk off a lengthy breakfast session of pain-au-chocolat and anal rape.

I oversimplify. There’s more to it than this, of course. But not in a good way. In what other place would a regional dish consist of a cauldron of cheese and a tin bucket of crutons? Where else does everyone smell so sweatily, sun-creamily foul? Like fat people in their fat-fleeces - who over time come to pong like the unmade bed of an incontinent eighty year old - skiers all smell funky by the end of the week. Is it any surprise? You’re sharing ski boots with about four thousand other people. Fabreeze might well destroy 99.9% of kiddie-fiddling bacteria, but you can guarantee whatever is sprayed into your ski-boots is only there to cover up the stench of the morons who came before you.

Shin-burn, sun-burn, ring-burn – expect all of these and more if you hit the slopes this year. ‘But wait!’ I hear you say. Except, frankly, I don’t. Cancel your ticket and go to the park instead. You’ll be glad you did.