Why do I do it?
Toby Young
How can anyone afford to go skiing? I've just spent a week in Verbier and I've returned to London completely bankrupt. The prices in Verbier's clubs, bars and restaurants took my breath away. The Farm, which is the most fashionable spot in the resort, charged £.160 to get in on New Year's Eve. Admittedly, this included several free drinks but if, like me, you're teetotal that's not much of a bargain. I would have had to consume a hell of a lot of Diet Coke to get my money's worth. So I ended up going to King's, which only charged a £50 entrance fee but made you pay for all ' your drinks. Even then, I was only marginally better off. When I asked for a splash of lime juice in my soda water the barman told me that would be an extra £2.
'That's reasonable,' I told him, 'provided you're suffering from scurvy.'
Of course, only a fool would come to a ski resort for the nightlife, but the skiing begins to lose its appeal after a week. First of all, there's the tedious business of putting all your kit on. Then there's the trek up the hill with your ski boots on and your skis balanced precariously on your shoulder, followed by the statutory half-anhour wait for all your friends to assemble at the meeting point. Only when they've all arrived can you join the queue for the cable-car — another half-an-hour. I was up at 8 a.m. every day but I rarely embarked on my first run before 10.30 a.m.
Once you're on the mountain, you spend most of your time waiting for the slowest members of your group to catch up. They invariably get lost, at which point you have to make a series of frantic calls on your mobile phone and by the time you've tracked them down it's 1 p.m. and you have to make your way to some distant cabin where you've arranged to have lunch with another group of friends, none of whom can be relied upon to get there before 2 p.m. Lunch usually isn't over until 3.45 p.m., by which time your companions are so pissed the most they can manage is to ski a few hundred yards to a second restaurant where they can consume another dozen bottles of wine. Of course, half of them don't make it, so it's mobile phone time again. If I had a pound for every time someone compared the whole experience to Groundhog Day I could afford a whole bottle of lime juice by now.
The alternative is to hire a guide and go off-piste, hut unfortunately I'm not really good enough. I did this on my second day with my friend Hutton Swinglehurst and regretted it almost immediately. Huttie is a better skier than me and trying to keep up with him and the guide proved beyond my ability. As they kept disappearing over the horizon I suffered from increasingly severe bouts of separation anxiety. All of a sudden I was eight years old again, huffing and puffing to keep up with a group of boys who'd just run away from me. Whenever I eventually caught up with them, Huttic would turn round to examine my tracks and compare them to 'a mad woman's shite: all over the place'.
So why do I bother? I always feel this way at the end of a skiing holiday and yet I end up coming back season after season. I've thought long and hard about this and I think the answer is because it's so dangerous. In the normal course of events, I don't find myself in many life-threatening situations. True, I live in Shepherd's Bush, but provided I cross the street when I see a gang of thugs coming towards me I can usually make it to McDonald's and back without being beaten up. Avoiding danger in your day-to-day life is just a question of not doing anything foolish.
However, when you're skiing, it's impossible to avoid being foolish. The mere act of putting on a pair of skis and hurling yourself down a mountain is completely insane. People get killed doing it all the time. Even if you're extremely cautious, there's no guarantee that some lunatic won't crash into you. Last week, for instance, I crashed into three people in a single day. Exposing yourself to this level of danger is exhilarating. The barrier separating you from sudden death shrinks to a paper-thin margin. I find myself regularly having to take evasive action in order to avoid being killed.
Ultimately, then, it all comes down to the death wish. Usually, when I'm standing on the edge of a precipice, I have to repress the impulse to jump off. But with a pair of skis on, I can happily leap into the abyss.
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