Best life

Never pass up a chance to ski

The snow is deep and crisp and even, the sky bluer than blue, and beneath my Black Crow skis the soft hiss of fresh powder. I’m rehearsing my excuses as I carve my wiggly way down a well-upholstered piste. “I’ve gone skiing by mistake,” I cry out on the pure mountain air. I’m almost embarrassed by my own excess as this is my second ski break of the year, and to go twice before Easter during a war and an energy crisis is giving peak first-world indulgence. Still, as I like to say, I have not one but two Agas, “just not in the same house,” so what the heck. Here goes. My two ski trips in two months, then.

ski

An Englishwoman in New York

For this trip, I’ve had to divulge my social-media handles, blood group, shoe size etc, and have therefore assumed the brace position for being "processed" into the US, not least because I was once, under Joe Biden, incarcerated in a side room at JFK for having an apple in my hand luggage. The border protection officers show not the slightest interest in my sarky tweet about neocon Liz Truss Though, I might add, it was even worse under Bill Clinton. My baby boy was placed in a detention center on arrival at Dulles when we relocated to Washington, .C. Oliver, aged six months, was traveling separately from us with a British nanny who’d over-stayed on a visa a decade before, and we didn’t know where he was for 24 hours.

new york