Going down a mountain with two planks of wood tied to your feet

Of course these days it isn’t wood but composite fibre glass, reinforced with blended aluminium pro-active power extension bars bulging out like badly made cyborg limbs and with words like “tron” and “atomic”, letters like “B” and “M” and numbers like ”2” and “5” embossed across the wind tunnel tested and computer designed lines.

But that would have been a very long blog title.

However, my skis were bad boys and I certainly wouldn’t have left them in a room with my mother. Presumably that is what the B and M stood for. They carved up the slope, slapped it up and demanded respect. They had attitude, they played by their own rules and I pity any fool that crossed them.

For the first few days they were unruly and hard to control, spitting on the street, snarling at small children and making them cry, always pulling at the tight leash I was trying to keep them on. Women worriedly clutched little ones close and shop keepers closed up when they saw us coming down the street.

I was thinking of taking them back to the pound but then they came across a pair of skis that intimidated such a living fear of the Almighty into them that from then on they behaved like lambs.

The skis belonged to one of the two locals who had kindly taken me and my brother W out for the day. She was once one of Austria’s top extreme skiers but had to give up her day job of being filmed chased by avalanches after a knee injury and was retraining as a doctor. She had flaming red hair and a diamond stud in her tooth.

Her skis had been forged in the furnaces of hell.

They were made from a strange dark materially, studded with iron and covered with ghostly twirling swirls of lost souls.

My skis started quaking and whimpering, cowering in the corner as soon as they saw them.

“Cool skis! Where did you get them?” I asked her on a chair lift.
“Thanks, some guy just gave them to me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, all I had to do was sign some contract.”
The skis sighed and let out a puff of green smoke that twisted into a silently screaming face.
“Maybe I should have read it.” she added.
“Probably just boiler plate.” I said.

Her skiing companion was a once part of the US downhill team but whose professional career ended sadly when a horrific head plant accident broke most of the bones in his face. Even after major re-construction he still looked not too dissimilar from a pancake. He now worked in real estate and was rich enough to take the winter off and spend it in Austria.

Needless to say they were both were insanely good skiers but cautious enough for me and W to make an admirably effort at keeping up. They took us down some unbelievably tree ridden off piste runs through deep light powder that you could float across like puffy clouds.

But skiing holidays aren’t about skiing or the skis you wear. They are not about the beauty of the mountains or the medieval town where you stay. They are not even about dubious contracts with the supernatural.

They are about how drunk you get in the bar afterwards.

And the winner was the chap who came with his girlfriend and her identical twin. They hadn’t been going out very long and when he got drunk he couldn’t tell them apart.

The only way to tell, he explained, was to get so drunk that he threw up and see which one looked away in disgust and which looked concerned and came over to nurse.

Not really understanding women I wanted to ask how that would actually help – but he was busy being sick.