Skiing

The Kurdish winter is bitterly cold, so thank goodness I was able to escape it by going up an icy mountain in France for a week of knocking over frozen trees with my face.

Most of my holidaying companions parallel-turned their way out of the womb and think nothing of weaving between spruces as they hurtle down sheer cliffs, but as the closest I'd come to skiing was playing 5-a-side at a sports centre that had a dry slope I signed up for ski school.  I had the misfortune to have borrowed a skiing jacket that was the exact same blend of red and white as the tops sported by the instructors of the Ecole de Ski Francais, and spent the whole week peering nervously over my shoulder, expecting to see a class of French 5-year-olds formed into a wobbly train behind me.  As it was, the only time I was mistaken for an instructor was when an English couple thought I was coming to help them teach their small son to ski, and watched in horror as I wrestled him to the ground in front of them.

Ski school was a lot of fun, although in the most part I think my class resembled the school for retards annual day out.  A would crash into B, knocking him over; C and D would help B to his feet and both fall over in the process; E would come hurtling down the slope and knock A into the pile of bodies.  Our instructor had been instructing in Morzine for 45 years and by the end of the week he could keep most of us upright most of the time, as long as we kept well away from each other.

Patrice and his class - combined experience 45 years and one month

Ski lifts are a source of constant danger, as getting off a four-man lift involves skiing in a straight line down a little slope while essentially forming a quarter of an eight-legged beast.  If any of the beast's components are unsteady on their skis, or waggle their poles a little too enthusiastically, spectacular falls can ensue.  Onlookers will be hoping that the next car will deliver its four-headed beast straight into the chaos.  I was involved in my share of ski-lift accidents, managing at one point to snap my pole between the legs of the unfortunate fellow to my right.  The prize, however, goes to one of my companions, who planted his pole onto the ski of a small child and glided off elegantly while the child went into a tail-spin and buried himself head first into the snow right in front of the next four people to arrive on the lift.

We stayed in a luxury chalet, complete with hot tub and chalet boy and girl who attended to our every need.  This was brilliant, although the hot tub was out of order and the chalet staff toasted the new year with some chemical that required them both to be rushed to hospital just before they were supposed to cook our breakfast.  The man next door came to our rescue and by 9.30am I was terrorising the children on the slopes.

My rusty schoolboy french was wheeled out, with mixed results.  I confused the words 'oreilles' and 'oiseaux' when describing a lost hat, baffling the man in the bureau de lost propertie, who couldn't understand why a hat needed flaps to protect the birds.  On a ski lift with three English people I accidentally answered the question "are you from Morzine?" by saying "yes", was too embarrassed to recant and had to spend the rest of the ride pretending to be a monosyllabic Frenchman.