How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [10]
It’s certainly better than eating the food. The food at ski resorts is cooked by people whose only qualification for the job is that they are called Arabella. Once, I was served salt soup. Mostly, though, it’s bread, which you dip in melted cheese. And because you are expected to melt the cheese yourself, the Arabella has more time to have sexual intercourse with her surly French ski-instructor boyfriend.
I am a very good skier … in my mind. However, video evidence suggests that I’m rubbish. I look like a bus driver in a primary-coloured anorak, sitting on an imaginary lavatory. Also I can only turn right. So to mask my embarrassment, and the pain in my thighs, I ski only when very drunk. I can recommend this wholeheartedly.
However, what you must never do is ski while under the influence of Billy Idol. No, really. I can absolutely guarantee that within five seconds of putting an iPod in your ears one of your bones will shoot out of your skin.
Of course you might imagine that there are other things to do on a winter holiday apart from skiing. ’Fraid not. On a normal summer break you can sunbathe, swim, snorkel, jet ski and, if you like the Guardian, go to look at museums. But on a skiing holiday what you do is get up at dawn, eat some salt soup and queue for hours to get on something that makes a Tube train look deserted. Then queue for some more hours because your place keeps being taken by burly Russians who have daggers tattooed on their foreheads. Then you ski until it goes dark.
You have probably heard about après-ski activities. In your mind, you see nightclubs and pretty girls and drinking fiery cocktails till dawn. Well, I’m sorry, but what actually happens is that you get back to your hotel or chalet, climb into a relaxing bath to try to jump-start your burnt-out muscles and fall fast asleep.
This is a good thing because in addition to the cost of the holiday and the flights and the ski rental and the lessons and the ski pass that lets you use the mountain, you will have been utterly bankrupted by your wardrobe. This year the cheapest pair of padded trousers we could find for my thirteen-year-old daughter were £250. And it’s not as if she can wear them anywhere else.
Finally there’s the weather. If it’s poor you will freeze and crash into things because you can’t see where you’re going. If it’s good – and over half-term it was very, very good – you will need sunglasses. And that means you will come home after a week with a face like a barn owl.
The thing is, though, that when the sun shines and you are whizzing along, drunk out of your mind, under a perfect blue dome with your happy, giggling children on a deserted, freshly pisted slope, and you’re about to have lunch in a restaurant with a view that is unparalleled anywhere on earth, none of the misery matters. Because there is no feeling quite like it. It’s called perfect happiness.
Sunday 24 February 2008
Bleep off, you’re driving me mad
I have just bought a dishwasher. And now I am thinking of smashing it into small pieces because when it’s finished washing the pots and pans it makes a beeping noise. And if I don’t empty it immediately it beeps again. And then again.
How stupid is that? It means you’re sitting by the fire, nodding off in front of the television, when you hear the electronic summons and, because you know it will go on until the end of time, you haul yourself out of your chair, pad into the kitchen, open the door and discover, as jets of superheated steam gush into your face, that the beeping was not, in fact, coming from the dishwasher at all.
So now you’re standing there, looking like Niki Lauda, wondering what on earth had been making the infernal noise. It could be anything, because these days everything beeps. Mobile phones beep when they are dying.