Ski

Tuesday

Zoe Strimpel

Wimps aren’t welcome at the Winter Olympics

My family skied a lot. We did it home-style, with packed lunches and Mars Bars on the lifts, my brother and me following my expert Milan-raised father down terrifying drops of ice in the twilight. We took our chances on low or no visibility, scraping round mountainous moguls and – my least favourite – careering through the root, stone and tree-stuffed terrain of the arboreal American off-piste. We wore the least trendy gear imaginable: huge foam-rimmed goggles already years old in the Nineties and never any hint of a helmet. Nobody but over-protective, scaredy-cat dorks wore helmets then. This background gave me two things.

Thursday

Taki

Mother Nature is giving us her middle finger

Gstaad I have never experienced such a long, continuous blizzard, and I’ve been coming here for 63 years. The ski lifts are closed, as are the hotels, and it’s been coming down for a week non-stop. My Portuguese handyman Fernando now lives on his snow plough, clearing the private road that leads to the house, as useless a task as trying to bail out the Titanic. By now I should be in London, enjoying my new rented house in Glebe Place. Instead I’m housebound and snowed in, a modern Prisoner of Zenda without the Ruritanian uniforms. My only worries are the possibility of an avalanche, and my son’s insistence that he ski every day. Nowadays, that boy simply ignores anything I say and drives away muttering about old people being scared.