That's you, that is

More symptoms of the galloping infantilism endemic in the UK this week, wth the news that skiers favour a system of speed checks, fines, breath tests and on-piste penalty points in a bid to clamp down on people hooning round the slopes while pissed as a fart on lunchtime vin chaud.

Nearly half of British skiers believe helmets should be made compulsory, it appears, though they don’t seem to have been asked how on earth they imagine this is going to make people go slower or drink less vin chaud. A third of them think speed limit signs would be a good idea, which raises interesting questions. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I personally am not actually fitted with a speedometer, what with my being a yuman bean and everything. Does this indicate that a third of skiers are actually cyborgs? I think we should be told.

Initially I was inclined to write the whole thing off as a load of old rubbish and a publicity stunt on the part of the insurance company which did the survey in a bid to terrify everyone into buying their overpriced travel insurance. But on reflection I have come to believe that it may actually be a stonking brainwave of an idea. Not that speeding or vin chaud feature prominently in my list of offences, mind, but they’ve opened Pandora’s box now, and you can’t get those bat-looking critters back in there however hard you try. Here are a few examples of what you can expect when I’m in charge of the newly minted piste patrol.

• 

  Oh go on then, don't mind if I do

  Hooning down the fall line while sitting on the tails of your skis: two points plus a hefty kick up the arse. It’s not clever, and it means you have even less control over your speed and direction than usual, if that’s actually possible. Stop it

• Clustering round a piste map right at the exit to the chairlift: three points. And you have to remain there while three boarders getting off the next chair use you all as skittles. Did you think all those people behind you in the queue fell off the chairs half way up or what?
• Wearing a romper suit with a fur hood: two points, and you will be required to walk about wearing a nappy for a day. Under no other circumstances would any self-respecting woman dream of wearing a garment specifically designed to make her bum look like Oprah on a fat day. No, it’s not cute. It makes you look as though you have a fat arse. Sorry.
• Wearing fancy dress: two points. Gosh, a banana! How hilarious. Though you can get rid of those points if you go to the ticket office and try to make a serious complaint while still dressed as a banana. We like a bit of comedy value.
• Sticking your bum in the air and your sticks under your armpits then straightlining it down the fall line: six points and a week in ESF cours collectif. You really don’t look anything like Didier Cuche, particularly in that romper suit.
• 

  No excuses, sorry.

  Snowblading: lifetime ban, no right of appeal. Ban extends into your next life if you were wearing jeans and a silly hat.

• Boasting about how your children ‘can get down anything’: four points. Children will generally follow a downward trajectory if you take them to the top of a slippery slope and let go. It’s not remarkable.
• Wearing a camera stuck to your head: six points. You look like a teletubby. I’m just waiting for the chairlift safety bar to come down on someone’s head and send £500 worth of GoPro for a burton.
• Posting headcam videos on YouTube: six points. Why on earth would anyone want to see three minutes of your ski tips, the trees, that bloke you narrowly missed, your ski tips again ……. etc. Koyaanisquatsi was more riveting, not to mention better shot.
• Using two-way radios: four points. I know mobile roaming charges are extortionate and it’s nice to know where your sister-in-law has got to with your kids, but is it worth looking like one of those survivalist gun nuts you find hidden away in corners of Kentucky, plotting to assassinate the pope?

There you go, that’s 10 fairly serious offences for a start, and we haven’t come close to skiing while off your tits on coke or knocking people for six and then speeding off laughing. Feel free to post your own contributions. Alternatively, consider whether we really want to end up subject to the sort of bossy little-Hitler type which inevitably applies for minor positions of power like ski patrol.

You like to be told to “shut the fuck up” by resort employees (or anyone else for that matter)? No, nor me. But that’s where you end up when you hand over all responsibility for your own actions to ‘the authorities’. It’s compulsory helmets this week, but next week it’ll be ski licences and GPS tagging, with the jackboots arriving on your doorstep the week after your holiday and carting you off in a straitjacket because you did 32 in a 30 zone. Be careful what you wish for.

Alleged apocalypse next week unless we come up with more cash, more likely

The end if the world continues to draw very slowly nigh, apparently, what with ratings agencies picking on France, Greece continuing not to tell the bankers they lost their bet and tough titty, Eurocrats sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling nananana not listening etc etc. The apocalypse is much more exciting than this in the movies – bloke wakes up in hospital to find the place teeming with zombies, everyone dead of hideously contagious disease which causes your brain to leak out through your nostrils and predatory aliens kidnapping everyone to work on their doomsday machine. Right, let’s get stuck straight in with raiding food stocks and waving guns about. Hurrah! Though they never seem to be short of things like hot water and decent shampoo, mysteriously.

This, on the other hand, is what the fall of the Roman Empire was like – a long depressing slide during which everyone with any nous went off to throw in their lot with the upcoming local warlord, until you found that there were half a dozen of you living in what used to be the tax office, dismantling the Coliseum in order to build a wall around the pigsty and drinking rainwater because you have no idea how the aqueducts work. Less gore involved, admittedly, but also a whole lot less exciting and more depressing.

Lower petrol consumption than a Twingo.

Not that that it’s having all that much effect on us up here as yet, with the possible exception of the astronomical price of petrol, which could shortly make it uneconomic actually to go to work in the first place. Possibly we should have a riot in protest, during which we could kill two birds with one stone and put a few bricks through Casino’s window while we’re at it. If anyone out there is driving to resort and thinking they’ll do a canny shop in the valley, don’t bother – whatever robbing bastard runs the place is charging more down here than the shops upstairs. The rest of us have all turned over to monthly supermarket sweeps in Leclerc and cellars stuffed with tins and dried food.

Skiers still seem to be skiing (come on, what sort of utter girls blouse would let the mere end of the world stop him doing that?), though I have noticed a) a lot more refused cards than usual and b) large numbers of people paying cash. I have to assume the refused cards thing just means people have failed to spot that their moolah is not going nearly as far as it used to and they’ve hit the wall at the end of the overdraft two weeks in advance.

Not sure what the wads of cash business is about though. Italians are notorious for rocking up at the ticket window first thing in the morning waving 500€ notes, but the French have started doing it this year as well, as a result of which we ran out of 5€ and 10€ notes entirely over New Year and had to wait a week for extra supplies from the bank. This was actually less inconvenient that you’d imagine, though people did get a bit shirty about being handed 15€ in small change.

Latest plan to overhaul the banking system

I’m told the Italian cash obsession is down to them all working on the black and no-one paying any tax (which might go some way towards explaining their current predicament), so maybe the French are all at the same scam and worrying about being left with a mattress stuffed with confetti when the euro finally gets round to imploding and we all have to go back to francs. Or possibly deutschmarks, depending on who ends up in charge.

Still, it adds a new dimension to the general chit-chat, which usually tends to focus on the weather and what effect that’s likely to have on visitor numbers/Parisian manners (lack of)/etc. What will happen in February? Will la crise keep them away, send them to the cheaper resorts or prompt them to blow their undeclared income on lift tickets and fin de siecle carousing? Will there be zombies? Who knows, but it makes a change from talking about whether or not it’s likely to snow on Friday.

Of course it’s always possible that euro meltdown might be good news for the British ski market, depending on whether or not it manages to immolate the pound at the same time. I can see you being able to buy a lot of lire for your squid, and you’ll probably need a rucksack if we’re talking drachma (yes, you can ski in Greece, believe it or not). On the other hand, the Hungarian midget might decide it’s a good electoral ploy to evict the Brits altogether, declare war and do a Napoleon. He’s about the right height, after all.

Am stuck in garage with piste bashers. Please send shovel.

This time last year we were all moaning ourselves into an early grave about lack of snow. Grumble, boring, where’s our snow, rubbish season, we’re taking our ball and going home, humph, we all said. Incessantly. Though to be fair, we had a point – looking at my snow reports from last season, I see that we had a grand total of eight days precipitation, and I seem to remember I was scraping the barrel a bit calling some of them ‘significant snowfall’. There’s a limit to how much entertainment you can get from skiing the same motorway-flat pistes for six weeks at a stretch.

Interestingly, the punters were all insufferably chirpy while this was going on. Lovely sunshine, great pistes, having a wonderful time, they all enthused whenever I chatted to them on the chairlifts. Wouldn’t want to be next week’s punter though, gosh no, you’ll need more snow, glad we came this week. Though the following week’s visitor invariably said exactly the same thing – having a great time, glad we’re not here next week. And so it went on until about mid-April, at which point a river appeared down the middle of Cretes and even the most positive of holidaymakers really couldn’t ignore the fact that he was having to slalom around amorous marmots and attractive water features. Place looked like Sunday afternoon in the garden centre.

Go up there if you like, but you'll have to tunnel your way out of the lift station.

All of which goes to show that a very large percentage of your holiday enjoyment is entirely down to your own attitude, and if you’re a miserable sod you might as well save your cash and be miserable at home because you’re never going to enjoy yourself whatever you do. It also means you seasonnaire types can all stop stressing over those customer feedback questionnaires with which your slavemsters keep browbeating you, since they’re quite evidently no reflection of your efforts and just an excuse for your managers to trouser your bonus.

This time round, on the other hand, we’ve got more snow than anyone has seen in a generation, and you’d think we’d all be wetting ourselves with joy. But no – too much snow, grumble, snowclearing, grump, where’s the sun, humph etc. Really everyone, take your heads out from wherever you’ve stuck them. If anyone has the right to be peeved this year it’s definitely last week’s visitor, who forked out a wedge of cash, got all excited about new snow and then found himself confined to barracks all week thanks to hurricane force winds, closed lifts and the distinct possibility that were he to venture outside, several tons of the stuff might fall on his head all at once.

When in doubt, hit it with a hammer.

Admittedly the wind has royally stuffed any chance we might have had of enjoying fresh fluffy powder, but on the bright side there’s a base which should last to the end of the season and beyond (barring any sudden global warming incidents), and next time it snows, it might manage to do so without attendant wind tunnel effect. The point being that we’ll still be here for next time, whereas your poor old punter has used his winter holiday allowance and has to go back to his desk job. Come on, how gutted would you be?

I'm sure there's a chairlift in here somewhere ....

Still, the lack of fluffy bits is almost worth the pictures we all got once the storm had abated and you had at least a 50% chance of survival if you stuck our nose out of the door. The people who came and shouted at me about lift closures last weekend might want to have a look at some of them. (Yes I’m looking at you, arrogant British bloke in a badly fitting helmet – being rude to the ticket monkeys will get you nowhere.) Not much consolation if you came out last week and couldn’t ski, I know, but maybe you could fake a bout of norovirus and pull a sickie later in the month. Go on, no-one would ever know.

Can someone throw me a sandwich please? I might be up here some time.

Pictures from Arnaud Guerrand at 2Alpes and the official Facebook pages of Alpe d’Huez and Les3Vallees. Big thanks to all the resort staff who got us up and running and back on the mountain this week.

Actually it probably isn't. Sorry.

Once again they all arrived en masse and mobbed the ticket windows, then complained that they’d had to wait in the queue. Given France’s excellent and widespread broadband access I can only assume they do it deliberately in order to have something to complain about. Indeed I’m sure of it, given that one of them reacted to my suggestion that she might order online in the comfort of her own home by waving her hands dismissively and saying she ‘didn’t have time to play with the internet’. You’ve got two hours to waste standing in an unnecessary queue when you’re supposed to be on holiday though, I note.

I have no doubt whatsoever that no-one will take any of this advice, especially since most of this week’s care in the community cases have been French and won’t be able to read it in the first place, but here goes.

1. Don’t ask me if you need insurance. How the bloody hell would I know? Do I look like your mother? No, don’t answer that. If you don’t remember paying for ski insurance at any point there’s a fair chance you haven’t got any, I’d say. But don’t quote me on it.

Monkey ......

2. I’m a seasonal ticket sales monkey, not an expert on the banking system. If you want to know whether or not you’ll be covered for piste rescue if you pay by card, think about asking your card issuer, not the cashier. (I do actually know the answer to this question because, unlike the rest of you, I have worked out how to use Google. But it’s company policy that I don’t tell you in case your bank wriggles out of paying and you blame us for it.)

3. Don’t go telling all your mates that you’ll pay for everyone’s pass on your card because then they’ll all be insured. They won’t thank you for the 16€ saving when they get the bill for helicopter rescue. I know it would be nice to be able to make up your own terms and conditions for your insurance policies, but I’m afraid the bank isn’t going to go for it.

4. I’m not here to explain to you how your own bank card works. When it posts up that message asking you to choose direct or deferred debit, do not put your PIN in instead and then look at me gormlessly when it doesn’t work. I can only assume you forked out the extra fee just because the colour of the card matches your handbag.

5. Do not swear at me when the bank refuses your card. It’s not my fault you’re out of overdraft limit, Mrs Fur-Coat-And-Nae-Knickers. Now push off and find some other means of paying. Yes, you will have to join the back of that queue again, mainly because you swore at me. If you want service from people, you will find that politeness pays dividends.

....... banker. See?

6. Italians – use plastic like normal adults. If you all stopped working on the black and paid some tax now and then, we might not be on the way to hell in a handcart and you might still have an elected government. Though given that the government in question consisted largely of Silvio Berlusconi, I can see where the idea of being bossed about by Brussels bureaucrats might have its attractions. And no, I don’t have change for a 500€ note five minutes after I’ve opened the ticket window. How much float do you think they give us?

7. Don’t throw a tantrum when I tell you the Diable is closed to walkers because of high winds. While nothing would please me more at this stage than seeing you stuck at 2100m looking at a closed lift in a howling gale, unfortunately the lifties won’t let you on in the first place and I’ll just get grief for selling you the ticket when I’ve been told not to.

8. You will not bully me into giving you a discount/the wrong ticket/that concession you’re not entitled to. Nor will I randomly change the company’s policies just because you want something you can’t have. Bear in mind that you’re only going to stand there and abuse me for about five minutes, whereas my supervisors have the opportunity to do so all season. They also have the power to decide whether or not I get my performance bonus, so quite frankly I’m much more interested in keeping them happy than I am in making you go away. You’re playing chicken with a train, mate, and you’re not going to win. Now bog off.

Fortunately for everyone’s blood pressure we only have a few more days of this before they all go back to whatever they do when they’re not poking customer service people with a pointy stick. Roll on January – low season shift patterns, chilled punters and from the looks of the weather, more powder than we can eat. Can’t wait.

Cheer up people, you're on holiday

According to the Royal-watchers this week, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have cancelled their ski holiday for fear of upsetting the hoi polloi in advance of impending economic meltdown and subsequent zombie apocalypse.

“William and Catherine appreciate that not everyone can afford to go skiing and that pictures of them on the slopes might send out the wrong signal.” said a courtier, according to the Telegraph Online. (They still have ‘courtiers’? How very Louis XVI.)

Really, what santimonious po-faced PR monkey came up with that one? It’s always been the case that not everyone can afford to go skiing, but that hasn’t stopped Wills and his bird (or indeed any of the rest of us) in the past. Some people can’t afford to heat their houses either, but I’m not about to leave all the windows open and freeze my tits off in sympathy, and I can’t imagine the royal newlyweds are either. Besides, what are they going to do instead? Don hair shirts and spend the festive period volunteering with Crisis at Christmas? It’s more likely to be designer ballgowns, vintage champers and stuffy social etiquette at one of the family’s several stately homes, I suggest, and none of the rest of us can afford that either, so they might just as well have gone skiing and enjoyed themselves.

I’m not entirely sure where the British press gets this idea that skiing is some kind of exclusive upmarket activity for posh people anyway. Clearly they’ve never taken a close look at the regulars in most ski resorts. Granted it’s never going to be as cheap as a week in a caravan in Wales, but there’s no real need to spend your cleaner’s annual wage on it either.

So Wills, if you’re reading this, here are my top five reasons for telling the PR monkey to put it wherever he puts his nuts.

Inevitable side effect of any kind of apocalypse.

1. We want your money. In fact the worse this apocalypse business gets the more we want it and the more of it we want. Ski resorts are full of people with precarious low-paid seasonal jobs, and businesses with five months in which to make enough money to last them the remaining seven, so bring the Coutts gold card with you and convince us that the whole trickle-down theory thing might just have some credibility. In fact, come for a month. Bring your mates as well. And make sure everyone else knows you’re doing it – the last thing we all need is for people to get the idea they should cut down on their skiing.

2. It supports British industry. Oh, all right, staying in some fancy chalet in Klosters isn’t doing much for the UK ski industry, but you don’t actually have to do it like that. Book with a UK tour op instead. I’m not suggesting you rub shoulders with the great unwashed in one of Crystal’s clubhotels, but I’m sure you could find something suitable with the likes of Consensio. Yes, I know your uncle got rinsed for £20,000 when Descent International went to the wall, but you’d have to be really unlucky for that to happen twice, right?

3. It provides employment for hard-working British youngsters desperate for a first step on the career ladder and not in any way out here to party themselves into oblivion and ski their nuts off. Again, you won’t see many of them if you insist on the Klosters private chalet experience, but think of the boost your presence on the slopes will give to the industry as a whole, creating many more barely paid jobs with exploitative employers offering Victorian wages and third world living conditions.

4. The pair of you are a lot better looking than George Osborne. If we’re going to have our pistes and bars roped off for toffs they might as well be toffs worth gawping at.

Time to get it out of mothballs? Probably not, really.

5. Nobody cares. You didn’t get carted off to the guillotine when you spent 10 days in a private luxury island paradise in the Seychelles, so I can’t see the mob tearing themselves away from their flat screen TVs over a mere ski holiday. No doubt you’ll see a certain amount of self-righteous huffing and puffing from the tabloids, but since both editors and readers have the attention spans of mentally impaired goldfish, they’ll be back on paedophiles and cures for cancer after five minutes and no-one will be any the wiser. You have, I’m afraid, cancelled a perfectly good ski trip for absolutely sod all.

No that's not my English teacher. Despite the vague resemblance.

Last time I wrote a book review I must have been about 13. And it may well have been The Lord of the Rings, chosen on the grounds that I’d already read it and therefore wouldn’t have to do more than minimum work to complete the assignment. With hindsight this seems perverse since my teachers had more of problem removing books from my vice-like grip than they did encouraging me to read - clearly obstreperousness purely for its own sake.

I don’t recall that the exercise was ever repeated, probably because none of the class had grasped the idea that a book review was supposed to be more than just a rambling synopsis of the plot. I imagine Miss Marshall was well aware of the contents of The Lord of the Rings even if she’d never read it.

So when author and former seasonnaire Alex Thomas offered me the chance to review her first novel I thought it would be rude not to have another stab at it. Come on, how often do you get that sort of second chance?

I should actually have had a copy of the book weeks ago, as the nice people at Illicit Snowboarding promised to send me one, but it seems to have been eaten by the post monster, along with a random part for an antique sewing machine which should have arrived about six months ago.

War and Piste, now that I’ve finally got my mitts on it, is an account of a season’s repping in a thinly disguised St Anton for a large tour op whose blend of corporate bullshit, incompetent management and contempt for staff leads me to believe it might be known collectively by its initials. Though I could be wrong – let’s face it, most of them operate a business model based on sociopathic managers, corporate wank and a policy of treating staff like cockroaches, so it could probably be anybody.

Author Alex Thomas. One too many Jägerbombs last night.

The buzz around the ski websites suggests the book is going down well amongst would-be seasonnaires (which should make for an interesting season for next year’s managers at any rate), and holidaymaking skiers, a bit of a surprise given some of its revelations. You think it’s funny that the chef did a runner on Christmas morning and your dinner consists of stolen turkey inexpertly cooked by the hotel manager and the KP? Really? Bollocks. If I’d known that I would just have admitted to it at the time instead of stressing about people finding out.

Serial seasonnaires will recognise both the endless ridiculous situations (having to ski guide when you don’t ski, being expected to get 65 guests on a 59-seater coach, carting small fortunes round resort in brown envelopes) and the mildly psychotic cast of characters (unstable chef, sexually incontinent hotel staff, manager blatantly only in resort to escape being sectioned), and those of you who abandoned the mountains and sold your souls for a desk job and a now non-existent pension will realise that it was either a) the best thing you ever did or b) a dreadful horrible mistake. Read it if you dare.

As a veteran of far more seasons than is good for me I chortled a fair bit, but I have to say that I found some of it jarring. A company which has its clubhotel managers share accommodation with their own staff? Seriously? And I’m sorry, but any hotel manager as wet as Suzanne would have either been eaten alive by her staff or sent home in a straitjacket within a week. HMs are not the same breed as reps and chalet hosts.

The other credibility-stretching aspect of the story was the idea that someone can progress from nervous snowplough to hitting wind lips and 45° couloirs in two months, with or without the help of a sexy sponsored Swede. Particularly given that the main protagonist is a girl. I know this sounds deplorably sexist, but in nearly 20 years of this sort of thing I must have seen about four female staff who came anywhere near being that serious about their skiing. Or boarding, which brings me to another less than believable point – she quit boarding for skis? In powder? Gerroff.

Ideal feet-up-on-the-balcony reading

Apart from that, though, War and Piste is a good read, albeit a bit chick-lit love story. Not that this is particularly a bad thing, but I wouldn’t buy it for the boys (though I wouldn’t put it past them to sneak a read at it when everyone else has finished either). Great stocking-filler for the ski-obsessed girly in your life, and prime material for a cheesy Christmas film if you ask me – if I were Alex I’d be giving some serious thought to touting it around a few studios.

Title: War and Piste
Author: Alex Thomas
Publisher: Traudl Publishing
ISBN: 978-1849141796
Get it from: Amazon, £8.99 in paperback and a mere £2.29 on Kindle. Now that’s the sort of price difference we expect to see between a real book and the e-version. Kudos for not ripping the reader off there.

Oh, do put away.

Now you may think people who spend their time on a bluebird powder day hanging about the side of the piste and peering at their smartphones are a bunch of complete tossers who need to get a life. And clearly I could not possibly comment, though personally I do try to refrain from getting mine out under those circumstances. And the phone as well. Fnar.

Still, I can see that having spent anything up to £500 on the gadget you might want to get some use out of it, though I suggest that trying to post photos of your fabulous off-piste skills to Facebook while on a chairlift probably isn’t the best way to do that. Not until they add a feature which allows you to do it while the phone remains safely in an inside pocket at any rate. Though no doubt such an innovation will be forthcoming at any moment, given the speed with which these things evolve.

One of the first thing I did on acquiring an iToy last spring was – obviously – to search on ‘ski’ in the app store. Which turned up practically nothing of much interest, I have to say. Searching on the name of your favourite resort, on the other hand, yields results.

2Alpes is offering techy skiers its own resort specific app this year, courtesy of the tourist office and the people at Lumiplan Montagne, who supply those big electronic piste maps you see in resort, with all the little lights on them showing what’s open. Rude not to try it, I thought, so I downloaded it, had a prod around at it and took it out on test over the weekend.

It has to be said that the whole thing looks very nice, especially for a freebie, and is very much uninfested with annoying advertising. I realise we have to pay for these things somehow or other, but if the ads get on your tits you’re going to delete the whole thing and look elsewhere, aren’t you? Developers take note.

The interface is very simple and easy to use (always good when you have five seconds before frostbite removes your fingers), and the app is packed with up to date and accurate infomation, something which frequently can’t be said of these things. In fact there are places where it’s more up to date than the tourist office’s own publicity material, presumably because it’s a lot easier to update a piece of software than it is to reprint all your resort brochures. The only thing you won’t find on here is anything relating to accommodation, (on the not unreasonable assumption that you’ve already sorted that out before you got here) and a map of the town, which is a bit of a glaring oversight. You can always use Google maps, obviously, but even so a plan of the village would be nice.

Wipe your goggles, blow your nose, or even find out where you're going

The piste map is available in standard or HD format, and I’d strongly recommend downloading the HD version, as the thing is small enough on a 3.5″ screen as it is, and anything which makes it clearer is a plus. It’s not really a substitute for a paper (or indeed multifunction goggle-wipe) map because a) it’s a bit small, b) you can’t see the screen in bright light however much you squint and/or try to hide it in your armpit in a bid to get it out of the sun, and c) dropping a piste map off the chair isn’t going to cost you more than your holiday did in the first place. But it will do in a pinch if you’ve already dropped the piste map, and provides a handy excuse to stop for coffee without having to admit to your children that they are skiing the legs off you and you are close to collapse.

Other features include a three-day weather summary (along with avalanche risk, road conditions and what’s open), webcams and a basic GPS tracker widget which will tell you your maximum speed, number of descents, total distance etc etc. It doesn’t have anything like the functionality of something like Core Coders’ Ski Tracks but it gives you more than enough useless information to convince all your fellow chalet guests that you are a sad stats-obsessed nerd and make them avoid you all week.

We ran the tracker for a bit over two hours on an iPhone 4 and used about 20% of the battery, which isn’t going to leave you without a phone half way through the day, though you’d be well advised to make sure you have a full charge in the morning if you’re planning to use the GPS. I wasn’t using the phone for music at the same time, and I suspect that if you want to do both at once you’re going to double the power consumption, so even more reason to make sure you have a full charge at the beginning of the day.

Yes I did post it to Facebook. Sorry.

The gizmo allows you to post your daily data to Facebook (so you can be ostracised by all your friends on there as well as your chalet-mates), but doesn’t save any of it locally, so if you want a record of all your week’s skiing (and why on earth would you anyway) you’ll be better off with something like Ski Tracks, which will set you back a whopping 69p. Irritatingly, the app doesn’t appear to allow you to stop recording over lunch and then start again at the same point, but resets everything to zero. A bit of a minus point there, as this would save quite a lot of the battery life over the course of the day. But it was free – what did you want, blood?

All in all, the thing is remarkably useful, boasting a decent piste map and weather summary, enough practical information that you don’t have to faff about going to the tourist office, and a fun GPS function. But potentially its most useful feature is the help button, top right of every screen. Tapping this gives you your latitude and longitude plus an emergency call button which takes you straight through to piste rescue. I can’t imagine that sort of detailed location is a lot of use to them, but you can always do the retro thing and just tell them which piste you’re on. Works for me.

We liked:

• easy intuitive interface
• bags of up to date practical information
• HD piste map
• detailed webcam views
• easy emergency call function

We didn’t like:

• still using the old piste map rather than this season’s updated version
• no ability to pause GPS recording during breaks
• only available for iPhone

We’d add:

• interactive map of the town
• accommodation info with access to an online booking system

But we’re nitpicking a bit, to be honest. This is a really useful piece of software well worth downloading. Get it from Apple’s app store, or via the QR code on the piste map. Unfortunately it’s only available for iPhone at the moment as I said, but you have to assume they’re busy on an Android version at least.

Errr ............ 50p? £1? Any more bids?

It used to be a bit of sport for local hacks or random members of the public to tease politicians on the election trail about their ignorance of the cost of everyday grocery items. Prospective candidate clueless regarding the price of a pint of milk, the headlines would cry, keeping schtum about the fact that most of us couldn’t actually give you that information off the tops of our heads either. Be honest, who wastes their time remembering the price of milk? You have to buy some, so you do. Besides, it’s quite likely to change three times before you next go shopping.

Being completely clueless as to how much you need to pay for a ski holiday is actually less understandable, since it’s something you don’t have to buy on a regular basis, and there’s a huge range of possibilities (not so with milk, which is mostly …… well, milk).

“Unlike the prime minister, I am not going to demonise the dinner lady, the cleaner or the nurse, people who earn in a week what the Chancellor pays for his annual skiing holiday!”, trumpeted Ed Miliband at the chimpanzees’ tea party which is prime minister’s question time yesterday.

Sorry I'm late, doorstepped by skiers.

I assume Mr Miliband woke up this morning to find every last one of the UK’s wintersports enthusiasts camping on his doorstep and demanding to know exactly where you can get a week’s skiing for £243,20, which is what you earn doing a 40 hour week on minimum wage. You’d best tell them Ed, because with finances the way they are, they’re not going to go away. The more things go TU the more we all want to leave it all behind and have fun, and the less we can all afford to.

To be fair, it’s probably possible to get yourself a flight, transfer and accommodation for that sort of cash as long as you’re not picky about dates, airports or whether or not your tour op will still be in business by the end of the week. So you could do a week’s self catering in Serre Chevalier’s three star Alpaga apartments with Thomas Cook for a mere £199 as long as there are seven of you prepared to fly out of Birmingham at five in the morning in the middle of January and spend the week squeezed into a hamster cage.

Unfortunately that price doesn’t include your six-day lift pass (205€) or equipment hire (another 100€ more or less, if you book online), which brings your total cost up to around £450. That puts the cleaner’s wage up to about £23,000 pa, something with which I’m sure she’d be absolutely delighted.

While I know people who would bite Mr Cook’s hand off to get at that sort of deal, they tend to be fit bearded Berghaus-clad types who have nowhere to sit down at home because every available space is taken up with skis, ski books, ski videos, ski gear, ski workbenches and the odd snowboard. Not pasty-looking old Etonians charged with important high-flying jobs like mismanaging everyone’s fiscal affairs.

I know, he doesn't look like a skier either.

Now, I have no idea whether or not George is a skier. He doesn’t look like one, but then neither does Boris Johnson, who apparently does it quite often. But I doubt if Boris slums it on rock bottom self catering deals to non-U resorts, and I can’t see George doing that either.

No, George looks much more like your Scott Dunn punter to me – condescending, over-entitled and unable to talk about anything other than house prices and their kids’ schools. Loudly, as a rule. (Hint to British middle classes – we don’t give a rat’s ass how much you paid for your house or where Jack and Oliver go to school. You can shut up now.)

Assuming he’s relatively modest in his requirements and goes for one of their mid-range Premier chalets, George is looking at a guide price for a low season January week in Val d’Isere of just shy of £2000. This might sound a tad extortionate, but remember he’s not having to cook his own dinner on two hotplates and sleep within half a metre of someone with whom he is not necessarily sexually intimate. Or not at the beginning of the week anyway. No, not only will he have his own room, he also gets a properly qualified chef, champagne and cocktails on tap, and tea in bed of a morning. It might be pricey, but you get a lot of service for your money chez Scott Dunn, it has to be said.

So where does this leave our hard-working cleaner? On a tad over £100,000 a year, by my calculations (which may very well be wrong, as anyone who knows me will tell you – feel free to work it out for yourselves). Change of life plan here – I’m off to the UK next May for a cleaning job. I’ll only need to do it for three months and I can come home again and loaf around the pistes all winter. Make it four months and I should be able to eat out every night as well. Pass the mop.

Abroad. Full of dodgy foreigners.

On of the big irritations of wintersports, judging from detailed observation of your holiday punter, is the fact that they have to be done in Johnny Foreignerland. And before you all think here she goes again doing the superior expat look-down-your-nose-at-your-countrymen thing, I’m including everyone in this. Italians are probably even worse than Brits for thinking you’ll understand what they’re on about just because they’re yelling at you very slowly. Russians seem to have a total inability to get to grips with even the basics of anyone’s language but their own (though they should probably get credit for starting with a different alphabet) and the Cloggy who asked me where the Dutch part of town was because they didn’t like all these English people everywhere rather summed it all up.

Obviously things would be a whole lot easier if you could ski in Swindon or snowboard in Sneek. And the Russians can in fact ski at home, but presumably the combiantion of dodgy infrastrucure and the risk of being murdered by religious zealots puts them off. (Having said that, I’d love to ski in Russia, so if anyone wants to send me in return for a rave review, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.) In theory, of course, the English could always holiday in Scotland (which has five ski areas, I’ll have you know), but since most of them claim not to understand anything we say and would probably be justifiably baffled by the idea of macaroni pie and beans it doesn’t really solve the innocents abroad problem.

Apres ski Germanic style

All of which explains why we hardly ever see Germans or Austrians. Why bother travelling all day just to put up with a load of foreigners and their weird food when you can pop round the corner for home made schnitzel and lederhosen just like Mütti used to make? You wouldn’t would you.

But I appreciate that most of you have no choice but to venture out into the dangerous wildernesses of abroad if you want to slide about on high-tech bits of plastic, so in a spirit of cross-border co-operation (by which I do not mean removing your elected government and replacing it with a brace of my mates, you’ll be relieved to know) I propose the construction of an international snowsports phrasebook. Not being a polyglot myself I can only supply a list of useful phrases in English, but if any of you want to translate it into the language of your choice, please feel free. Once we’ve got enough translations we can turn the whole thing into a smartphone application and make a killing.

On arrival at the airport:

• I wish to report my luggage lost/stolen/damaged beyond repair.
• What do you mean, it’s in Reykjavik?
• Where is the (insert name of TO) rep?
• What do you mean there’s no (insert name of online travel agency) rep? I booked with (online travel agency).
• Which is the coach to (insert resort name)?
• My coach has gone without me, where can I get a taxi?

On the transfer coach:

• Can we stop for the toilet/something to eat/to be sick?
• No I don’t want your overpriced ski pack at a ruinous rate of exchange.
• I have already ordered my lift pass online. Bugger off.
• Rep, the driver is not using his hands/is on the phone/is smoking a cigarette.
• The driver is dangerous/mad/homicidal/asleep.
• Aaaarrgh!

In the chalet:

• I am a vegetarian/vegan/fruitarian/pain in the arse.
• I do not eat red meat/pork/fish/vegetables/that.
• Oh really? I’m sure I put it on the booking form.
• Is this wine supposed to taste of cat piss?
• I am lactose/gluten intolerant.
• No that’s fine, I can eat lots of cake.

At the ski hire shop:

• Yes I want expert skis – I have skied for two/three/four weeks.
• I would like fat powder skis because I ski off piste all the time.
• Yes I know it hasn’t snowed in a month.
• I want skis with rocker technology/reverse camber/iOS5.
• I want to change these skis, they don’t turn properly/are the wrong colour.
• My skis have been stolen. No I did not take the ski insurance.

At the ticket office:

• How much!!?
• No I did not think to check the price before I booked the holiday.
• Can I take my child on the chairlift in my rucksack?
• The weather forecast says -50°C on the glacier. Does that mean it will be cold?
• I didn’t ski on Wednesday, can I have a refund?
• Which shop did I hire these skis from?
• Where can I buy a turkey? (yes this was a real question)

In the mountain restaurant:

• 30€ for an omelette, you are having a giraffe mate.
• Waiter? Waiter! Heellloooooo, earth to waiter!!
• Do you have a toilet I can get to without descending a rope ladder in ski boots?
• This steak is cooked properly, can you take it back and burn it please.
• Do you have anything which doesn’t consist of lard, cheese and potatoes?
• Can I eat this sandwich I stole at breakfast on your terrace?
• Ow!

Apres ski:

• Yes thank you I will have another of those flavoured vodka shots.
• These flavoured vodkas are great aren’t they?
• mumblemumble slur youremybestfriendyouare bleaaargh
• I apologise for my friend.
• It’s the altitude, he’s only had 15 vodka shots and six pints of Stella.
• He’s got food poisoning, everyone in the chalet is ill, it’s disgraceful.
• Yes of course we will clean it up.
• No I’m fairly sure he won’t die of hypothermia on the way back to the chalet.
• Errr …. which way is (insert name of chalet).

Obviously I shall trust you all to make faithful and accurate tranlations and not snare unwary skiers into uttering such embarrassments as ‘my nipples explode with delight’ while innocently trying to tell the ticket office cashiers that they have lost their lift passes, thereby leaving me vulnerable to arrest for publishing a phrasebook with intent to cause a breach of the peace. Because I know none of you would so much as consider doing such a dastardly thing.

That classic Hungarian phrasebook sketch in full

Are you sure you want that ice cream?

Yes it’s official – according to this morning’s Daily Telegraph, the British are a bunch of lazy porkers. It seems almost a quarter of us are so fat we can’t waddle for a bus without risking collapse, and our continued addiction to chips and unidentifiable greasy things from Greggs is turning our arteries into wool. Not that this comes as a huge surprise, given we can spot the British punters in resort a mile away just by the amount of extra padding they’re wearing.

‘Experts’ from the European Commision are concerned, according to the Telegraph. I’m not sure why because it’s really none of their business whether or not British women want to live on a diet of Coke, KFC  super-lardbuckets and nasty plastic doughnuts. They can’t even harp on piously about The Cost To The NHS, since they neither contribute nor use the service, what with most of them being German. Or Belgian. Let the fatties stuff their faces if they like, I say – they’re going to be a lot cheaper in the long run than skinny healthy types who don’t have the consideration to keel over with a heart attack at 50 and insist on rinsing the system for hip replacements, cataract operations and 10 years worth of meals on wheels. Besides, the smokers are probably footing the bill for the whole lot and still leaving us all a bit of spare change.

Be honest, do they look like a foodstuff to you?

But having said that, it’s probably a good idea to give some thought to your physical fitness (or lack of it) if you’ve booked a ski holiday, particularly if you don’t want to meet your maker mid-piste. Piste rescue pick up at least one heart attack a year and probably more. Seriously, what makes people think they can sit on their bums all year doing nothing more strenuous than prodding the PS3 remote and then spend a week doing exercise at altitude for eight hours a day? Tell them to go jogging all day every day for a week and they’d look at you as though you were insane (which you would be). But just because it’s skiing they think they’ll survive the experience unscathed.

Now I’m not suggesting you should be fit enough for an Ironman Triathlon before you so much as look at Iglu but let’s be honest, how much would it hurt just to walk to KFC now and then rather than take the 4×4? You probably spend more time looking for a parking space than you would making the entire round trip on foot.

Oh I haven’t got the time for that, I hear you say smugly, as if working 12 hours a day when you’re only paid for eight is in some way laudable. Besides, you spend four hours a day watching TV or so we’re told. Which makes nearly 30 hours of your life you’ll never see again every single week. You could go swimming three times a week and still have enough time to watch far more Jeremy Kyle than is good for anyone’s mental health.

But if you don’t fancy venturing out on a wet November night, there are plenty of at-home exercise suggestions out there in the webworld, most of them apparently designed to make you look very silly indeed. But if you close the curtains and lock the door to the spare room you’ll probably get away without anyone knowing about it.

Remain to be convinced

For the gizmo-obsessed, there’s the Skiers Edge, a machine which claims to mimic the effort of skiing in all sorts of different conditions from moguls to powder, before being consigned to the garage with that cycle training machine you swore you’d get so much use out of. Try before you buy would be my advice there. Not that it’s all that easy to buy one, as the website tells you it’s not available in stores and then makes you jump through hoops before they’ll condescend to sell you one themselves. They keep very schtum about prices too, probably because if they told you how much it cost you’d have a coronary right there and then, thereby losing them a sale.

ifyouski.com offers a more accessible set of exercises, most of which look as though you could just about do them in the space between the spare bed and the freezer. You will need two balls, a set of big elastic bands and a bit of carpet, from the looks of things. Or maybe it’s a yoga mat. I’m not sure I can take an exercise called Dying Bug seriously though, and I feel a helmet would be wise in case you fall off the ball and bean yourself on the edge of the bed. Not much in the way of gnarly points in that as a ski injury.

Unlike Skiers Edge, who clearly don’t really want to sell any of their products, the chaps at Avalanche Ski Training are so eager for you to buy their e-book that they give you more or less one order button per paragraph. And given that their system promises to Turn Your Legs Into Pillars Of Steel! why wouldn’t you? Apart from the fact that looks suspiciously like a heady mixture of tosh and snake oil.

If you’ve got far more money than sense and feel like being royally fleeced, the FT’s How To Spend It website suggests a weekend in a country hotel (a ‘sportif’ country hotel, mind you, which presumably makes all the difference) where you get a couple of fitness classes ‘tailored to your physique’ plus half a day’s skiing in a giant fridge. Because that’s really going to offset the effects of an entire year spent doing nothing but messing with your Wii. Prices ‘from’ £495 per head (ie more than £495 a head). You could book a second ski holiday for that. Two, if some of the offers I’ve seen recently are anything to go by.

The bad news.

So in the absence of vast amounts of wonga and/or a spare room big enough to swing a cat, what can the average skier do to avoid dropping dead before he gets back for the first day’s afternoon tea and cake? I know you don’t want to hear it, but probably pass on the doughnuts and Coke a bit more often. And stay out of the car – they’re overrated, whatever Mr Clarkson might have to say about it. Think about it – does he remind you in any way of the sort of super-fit ski god you’d like to imagine you could be? No he doesn’t. Pasty-faced lardarse would be more like it, I suggest.