***This post may reach some of you twice! Sorry about that. Due to a Substack bug this post only went out to a few people, so I am sending it again***
There are watershed moments in life, when you must decide what sort of person you are going to be. Cat or dog? Coffee or not coffee?
Ski-ing? Or not.
We never went ski-ing when I was a child. So, defensively, whenever I was asked if I could ski, I said, “No. Ski-ing is for twats.”
And yet, here I am in Solden, in Austria. Ski-ing. Solden means nothing to me and probably means nothing to you, either. We are here because a travel person offered to sort out the holiday for us, (Giles and I being incompetent as we did not grow up ski-ing), and we knew that my son, Sam, was going to like ski-ing. He’s just got it written all over his face. And we wanted to give him a flying chance at it, give him a chance to be a happy ski-ing person and not a person who said defensive things like, “Ski-ing is for twats.”
I mean it is for twats, but only in the same way that absolutely everything is for twats. We’re all just twats, twatting about.
And my god the hassle of it all is no more or less than I thought it would be. It’s just a clusterfuck of poles and goggles and socks and ski passes. Carrying ones own skis and poles and stupid buggering helmet is bad enough but when you have to do yours and the kids shite as well… it’s just not humanly possible.
So kind of phew, then, that after 2 hours of SkiSchule on the first day, Kitty went on a hunger strike, folding her bony arms and tapping her long fingers on her elbows, the angriest person to ever wear a pair of salopettes. “I am not going ski-ing again,” she said. “And you can’t make me.”
One pair of skis down, I thought to myself. Had Sam hated it, too, we’d have been on the next plane back to Heathrow. But Sam loved it. “I love this!” he screamed from the nursery slope. He doesn’t even mind that the instructors all shout at him in German and that he was left for 20 minutes in the snow on the side of the chair-pole thing lift track when he fell off.
So now we have this strange thing where one person out of four is not ski-ing. Giles and I take it in turns to wander about Solden with Kitty, pointing at all the stuff people have chucked into the river over the years and peering at menus in Tyrolean theme restaurants. Whoever isn’t doing that does flying-airplane arms, following our Austrian ski instructor, who is embarrassingly clearly a serial killer cleverly hiding out in the mountains.
He has taught me to say, auf Deutsch, “Ich komme gleich,” (spelling?) which means “I’ll be right there.” I am very tempted to get him to teach me how to say, “The body is buried under my hot tub deck.”
At 3pm we fetch Sam from the shouting Germans at SkiSchule and come back to the hotel - clank, clank, carry, carry, sweat, sweat - and fall face-first onto the bed. Then I get up and sort out all the fucking kit, hanging it all up and pulling gloves out of pockets and unpicking goggles from helmets. My eyes are dry and shrivelled, I have never ever been so tired in my life, think I may have done irreparable damage to the muscle tissue in my thighs. And why do ski boots have to be so sadistic.
Und du? Are you a ski-ing person or not? And if you are, where is your favourite place to go? I’m still not a ski-ing person, but I fear my son is.
Please leave any excellent ski-ing recommendations in the handy box below.
"Absolutely everything is for twats. We’re all just twats, twatting about."
I genuinely want that on a t-shirt.
Spikers’ recollections of injury and sheer terror on the slopes rings true for me too.. but to redress the balance, if you can push through the learning hell, ski holidays can be a great way of combining exercise, sun, incredible panoramas and a shared sense of adventure with your children. My husband was the catalyst for starting our family young, it helps hugely to have someone who can be Leader, read piste maps correctly and help incompetent children off ski lifts. And I endorse the benefits of a private guide/instructor for at least some of the holiday.