skiing: a love story
I’m writing this from a hotel bar in Chamonix in the French Alps, where I’ve spent the last week skiing with my sons — a luxurious Easter holiday thanks to a leftover ‘family room’ voucher booked for a wedding that was cancelled twice due to Covid, which the French management refused to refund.
It’s been heavenly, the first properly organised vacation I’ve taken with the boys just the three of us, as a family unit alone. I’d forgotten how much I love skiing. Specifically the feeling of losing myself for long periods of time in a physical activity which is all-encompassing, technically challenging, unmediated by intellectual effort and yet also, because of beauty of the landscape and the raw emotion it provokes, undeniably sublime.
Yesterday afternoon in the pool, Frank pointed up at the mountains to the south of the town (on which there is no skiing) and said, Mummy, what are those mountains for? At first I did not understand.
They aren’t for anything, I said.
But if they’re there, how can they not be for something?
The mountains are just there for themselves.
He looked at me blankly so I tried to put it another way:
They were here long before us and they’ll be here long after we die.
Us or all humans?
All humans.
Frank took this in, nodding slowly and seriously.
So the mountains were here before the dinosaurs?
I think so, yes.
So they just belong to themselves then?
Yes.
Another long pause.
Well it’s nice they let us ski on them.
Yes it is.
Did you have to pay them?
Who? The mountains? No, no.
Well that’s nice.
Yes, I suppose.
*****
Shortly after moving to London I remember interviewing a wealthy English author who happened to mention he was about to go skiing in Klosters. When I asked him naively what language they spoke there, he laughed.
‘Money,’ he said.
I remember being baffled. I’d never thought of skiing as a rich person’s thing. That how new to London I was.
*****
I am not a rich person, but I do know how to ski. I ski the same way I do everything I love: fearlessly, without vanity and the results, while occasionally disastrous, on balance tend to be deeply satisfying, if only to myself.