Going Downhill Fast. Again. But in France

I’ve put the wrong thing in the chilli and it smells weird so am up here in denial.
We can blame a jar of something that needed using up (by which I mean throwing away about a month ago). And when I say we, I mean me. For I fear I’ve spoiled it, and since I am being good, and not drinking in the week, I can’t even slather my palate with vino and not give a damn-o.

Suspect housewifery made so much worse by our having returned from France on Saturday after a fine week’s skiing.

My prowess recedes each year and I am possibly as good now, after a total of 8 weeks on skis, as my eleven year old was after just his second day, back when he was 5.
Both the children are horribly good, tipping themselves down black runs like James Bond villains while I, the Nan of the piece, wobble and fret and nurse my joints, shaking my poles at snowboarders. It comes of starting too old and indeed I can only really bank on being better than learners on their very first day.
But even the cat needs someone to kick and a most cruel pleasure I take, I freely confess, in swooshing past those timorous souls clinging to the slopes and so very obviously hopeless, scared to their inner core with “I Am New To This (and I wish I were at home…).” There is always a black day – or several when you are actually learning to ski – where your soul comes up against your resolve and both are found wanting, a depressing glimpse of unpleasing character. A form of schadenfreude exists, mefears, where it is not enough, to be a little bit OK at something but there must be serried, too, the ranks of the truly inept. And they must watch you fly past, and something approaching awe must cross their desperate faces. God, it’s good. Not too, too close. I stopped short of quite slicing over the back of their skis lest my guardian angel took umbrage at such boastful folly and made me tumble, a yahoo thing in padded orange, arse over tit and firmly put in her place. Couldn’t have that.

So by day it was early rising, and practising being old.
A kindly physiotherapist at our chalet lent me a serious knee brace: part Hannibal Lecter rubber and part scary metal. It took some hauling on and left parched summer river bed creases deep in my chubby leg come night time when finally it was peeled off. My left knee gained a renewed and cocky juvenilia while my right knee sulked and took refuge in envy. Other limbs and joining bits, elbows and things, creaked and all the myriad moves of the day before replayed in reverse, the stretches and leaps and thigh-trembling horrors cruelly recalled in the reduction of movement remaining now. Walls were clutched to steady the progress down to breakfast. Chairs were hard to sit on without a sudden collapse through the last free-falling inches.

Skiing occupied each morning. After the laying on of the necessary armour: the imprisoning of each foot in brutal ski boots, the zipping and tucking in and velcroing of layers, the snap of the goggles, the bustling with hats and straps and tugging on with teeth of gloves, the cumbersome underwater movements, the doing the same for your children, one is almost too exhausted to stamp into skis and take off.
Mindful of the pleasure to come, and the emptying of the bank account to have got there at all, one does shift arse and get going, but it’s tough pursuing unnecessary enjoyment and I expect pity.

Lunch was basically raw meat which T11 and I tore at greedily, choking down the iron of blood, all but snarling as we grappled with our salad and chips while E winced painfully, delicately, at our primeval excesses and sipped virtuously on some grim vegetable soup, which he felt duty-bound to declare delicious. Ie: wholesome, ie: disgusting. F9 ate compulsive pizzas, skinny and stretched and clearly moreish. The coke of both wobbled on too-small tables.

More skiing in the afternoon, made marginally more reckless fuelled by a steadying petit pitcher du vin blanc. Reward for survival.
Moments perched perilous high on chair lifts swaying from their cables when stopped without warning. Metallic shrieks of untrustworthy machinery and the buffeting of alarming winds to contend with before the relief of the take up of speed again as inexplicable as was the stop. We could picture poor souls (bungling variety) in a heap of poles at one end or other of the chair lift: we’ve all been there, glamorous it ain’t.

The lifts begin closing at 4.15 and there is a final rush to time it all right: to maximise their use without stranding oneself the wrong side of a mountain and a hefty bill charged by a taxi driver. And then home to shortbread and a cup of brown liquid, called in misplaced optimism, “coffee.”
Somehow the next three hours are what it takes to change, to transform oneself from ageing, shagged-out teletubby lumbering in unseemly quilty infantile clothing into something which can be tickmarked adult human, where legs are shown, and faces revealed and hair sort of brushed. To shower in a tiny enclosure, to knock back a comforting glass and to slide into a chair and chomp on surprisingly delicious food, chalet food generally being an unreliable thing.

Too much wine later was bed time and an unfolding of the thing called our bodies onto small hard beds to dream and feel the swoosh continue through the soles of our feet before morning came too soon.

Morning actually came in the middle of the night on our final day, at 3am when we woke in haste to catch our coach. But snow in the night had caused a domino effect of trapped coaches up and down the mountain road and we were abandoned to the limbo of a hotel seating area, anxiety about catching our plane gnawing slightly at the tiny bits of us which were awake. Apart from the children who just quarrelled over their Nintendos and were horribly hearty.
Rescue came, late, in the form of a delightful girl, very ra and very rude and very un-pc, who cannoned us down another road in her Kanga van-cum-car and thence to another bus which confidently started driving us to the wrong airport. Mercifully I said something. Usually, I wouldn’t have bothered, having an utter trust in the competence of others, particularly with regard to things useful like driving buses. I hazarded a query. Which the bus driver ignored but when I repeated it again, she reacted insofar as to flounce and roll her eyes and stab at her phone buttons and nod a lot, and then turn round.

Can I say it’s great to be home?
Let’s consider the evidence.
There: sun, snow, a feeling of achievement, staff.
Here: boiler going haywire, endless laundry, house a tip, bills rolling in, week-time wine a thing of the past, Lolly still bald as a pipe-cleaner, the chilli in chaos.
Whaddya think?