From time to time, I worry about being a bit of a spoilsport in this column. An old Victoria Meldrew. I complain about leaf blowers, telling them that they shouldn’t wear the wrong kind of wellies and that they can only have curtains, not blinds, in their house. Still, I’m not sure there’s anything in the world I feel more belligerent about than skiing.
Is there a dumber sport? Golf is pretty silly and Finns like to carry handcuffs, but riding a rickety elevator can make you vertigo just so you can slide down a dangerously steep, icy slope with a pair of oversized knitting needles attached. at your feet? Doing that over and over, several times a day, the only consolation is a piece of melted cheese and a pickle the size of paracetamol for lunch? Come on, admit it, it’s very silly. And the boots! My God, those boots. Those are the wrong kind of boots entirely. It would be more comfortable to strain your toes in a couple of blocks of wind every morning.
There’s a lot of skiing going on right now, with the Winter Olympics kicking off and Instagram full of people beaming from a mountaintop. They seem to be having a good time, but I don’t think they can be.
I went skiing for the first time when I was 13 years old. After teetering to the top of the Val d’Isère kiddie slope on a chair lift (hateful invention), I immediately fell on my grandmother, then a very elegant and chic mid-60s who had skied wonderfully all her life. She hurt her hip in the fall and never slalomed again.
Things did not improve. I dropped out of ski school after three days because, while my class was progressing, I wasn’t. I hated falling, I hated the noise my knitting needles made when they slipped on a piece of ice, I hated my stomach churning as the funicular went up and the French around me, dressed as if they were regulars on Ski Sunday, They were rushing towards the doors when they opened.
I hated three-year-olds rushing up my legs, I hated the temperature, I hated taking half an hour to undress to pee and another half hour to put all those layers back on. And he really, really hated anyone who suggested “One more run before lunch?”
I’ve tried skiing two or three times since then, and I’ve always wondered if this was the trip that caught the bug. No.
The only positives are the views and the hot chocolate, and I can get both at my local park, so I don’t see much point in spending £9bn on a ski pass and a lumpy bed in a chalet during one week. Especially when there is a high probability of tearing a ligament on the first day.
A certain member of my family has a theory that skiing is an exercise for people who barely move the rest of the year; that they justify being idle toads for 51 weeks on the grounds that they slide down one snowy hill to another and won’t stop talking about it for the next 11 months. Maybe.
I also suspect that, at this point in the calendar, there are those who crave hot vacations and the feel of the sun on our milky limbs, and there are those psychopaths who want to go abroad to someplace even colder, where you have to wear more clothes. I know what field I’m in. Don’t even get me started on Cresta.
Relocation, relocation, relocation for jet-setting pets
Several expat friends are fleeing Hong Kong, fed up with the quarantine rules and China’s invasion. They mostly go back to Britain or head to Singapore, but what to do with their possessions? According to a friend, containers cost five times more than they did a couple of years ago, and shipping pets is causing headaches. A few months ago, he paid £4,000 to move his dog to London. Now the demand is so high that others are struggling to find room for Fido on trade routes. His cheapest and easiest solution has been to form a club and charter a private plane. According to the aircraft broker, cats, birds and turtles have also flown. If you think sitting next to a crying newborn is bad, imagine nine hours sitting next to a chattering parakeet.
Ooh, you really are a wreck, but I like you
Are you a “carnisplorer”? I hadn’t heard this before, but according to Oliver Chadwyck-Healey, Waitrose’s meat buyer (and husband of Telegraph fashionista Ginnie), the food chain is seeing increased demand for nuggets like lamb liver and oxtail as
we become more creative cooks. “These adventurous carnisplorers are adopting the nose-to-tail way of eating,” says Oliver, adding that it is a more sustainable way of eating. Unusual food labels like these always make me laugh. I first encountered “frugivores” in Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill (“We think fruits and vegetables have feelings, so we think cooking is cruel”), and in my latest novel I included a very irritating, who only eats food. that doesn’t “harm” the planet (although he drinks a lot of New Zealand wine). Carnisplorer can now be added to the list. Who wants a pig’s ear in mine?
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