Deborah Ross and her family travelled with Powder Byrne and stayed at the Mont Cervin Palace in Zermatt. Prices from £2,408 per adult, including seven nights’ half board, flights from London, transfers and resort service. Powder Byrne’s “Learn in Style” programme is running in Grindelwald and Arosa at February half-term from February 20, and Arosa at Easter from April 3, and costs £435 per adult for five days.
The Times
22 January 2011
Read Original Article Here
"Deborah Ross takes to the slopes – and finds lying stuck on your back like a beetle in the snow has an unexpected appeal
It’s Day Two of my first ever skiing trip and I’ve already learnt a few basic truths about skiing:
1. Ski boots hurt like hell.
2. Although the “snowplough” is the accepted way of coming to a stop, screaming, “Out the way, out the way. I’m new to this!” before hurtling into a tree also works in its own way.
3. It requires so many layers of clothing you need to be up and swaddling by 4am if you’ve any hope of hitting the slopes before noon.
4. You must look meaningfully at a large billboard map before embarking on the most modest ascent, although I couldn’t tell you why.
5. Your lumbar region will want to know what it ever did to you, and may even call you “Bitch!” under its breath.
6. Once you fall over in skis – as you do, a lot – it’s impossible to get up, and you will flail about like an upturned beetle as expert Swiss toddlers circle you and retreat doing back-flips.
7. You will often wonder to yourself: why? Why, when I could be at home doing something agreeably middle-aged, like pottering around in slippers and waiting for the right moment to turn the central heating up behind my husband’s back?
8. At some point your instructor will ask you to do something and the word that comes out your mouth will be, “No!” And then, “NO! NO! PLEASE GOD, NO!”
Today is the day that the “No!” comes out of my mouth. I’m still on a nursery slope, but it’s a little steeper than yesterday’s nursery slope, and there is a frozen lake at the bottom. Admittedly, it’s some way off – miles away, some would say – but it’s a frozen lake, and I can see it. Richard, my lovely, endlessly patient, never shouty ski instructor, whom I have come to adore, is encouraging. “Ready?” he asks. And I say, “No!” I feel bad, but everything in my body is screaming, “No! No! No! No!” and so this is what comes out of my mouth. “No!’ I say. “No! No! No! No! No!” And: “Please God, no!” It’s the lake, I tell him. I will lose control and plunge into the lake and die. Richard is reassuring. The lake is a distant lake, he says. It’s fenced, he says. I’d hit a snowdrift first anyhow, he says. It can’t happen, he says. But my knees are all watery and my stomach is like churning porridge and I can’t remember a thing from yesterday’s lessons and my heart is beating so fast I think my chest might explode out of my ears. “No,” I repeat. “I’m not doing it. No.”
So, why am I skiing? Why, why, why? Because, I think, I was asked if I’d give it a try in August, when winter seemed too ludicrously far off to worry about. I am short-term in my thinking. (As I write, for example, I’m fairly certain next week isn’t going to happen, and as for the week after? No way. You’ve more chance of winning the lottery.)
But then August fades to September, September to October, and so on and so forth, as longer-term thinkers always knew it would, and suddenly I’m up against the departure date and in a blind panic. I don’t want to go skiing. I’m not interested in skiing. Skiing is alien to everything I am. I am an indoorsy sort of person. I’m a non-adrenalin junkie. I don’t want to swaddle myself in £3,000 worth of DayGlo kit and slide down an icy mountain on a pair of glorified planks. I don’t understand why anyone would when they could be at home pottering, with the heating turned right up. I certainly don’t understand all those families who bray about their half-term skiing trips. (What did these parents buy their children PlayStations for? To gather dust?)
And I’m a fearful person. I have too many fears to list in full – spiders are a big one, but not particularly relevant here – so will only list the most pertinent, which include the cold, exercise, speed, heights and hurtling into frozen lakes, snapping all my limbs and dying. The American humorist Erma Bombeck once said of skiing, “I don’t participate in any sport with ambulances at the bottom of the hill.” I would also ask: why only at the bottom? Who is to say you will reach the bottom? Why aren’t they lining the route?
But I’ve said I will go and as I’m as good as my word – when I said: “No!”, didn’t I mean it? – I set off for Zermatt because, I suppose, if you are too terrified to ski you might as well be too terrified to ski in the Swiss Alps at one of the world’s top resorts. I’ve hastily assembled skiwear, borrowed from my 13-year-old niece, Holly – thanks, Hols! – who went skiing with her school last year. This is why I’m in hot pink. My husband, who is coming with me, has many eccentricities – too many to list here – one of which is a hankering for the old way of doing things, which is why he is wearing wool. He says, “What do you think people wore in snow before synthetic fabrics?” And, “Wool can absorb up to 30 per cent of its own weight in water without feeling wet.” And, “Mallory climbed Everest in tweed.” I would remind him that Mallory died on Everest, but don’t because he is useful in spider-related emergencies, and I need to keep him sweet.
So I’m in hot pink and he’s in wool and as I say to the photographer, Jude, when I first speak to him on the phone: “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble recognising us on the slopes,” which he doesn’t. “I saw you straight away,” he even says. “No problem.”
Zermatt is gorgeous. It’s at an altitude of 5,315ft – who knew anything was higher than Brent Cross? – and is surrounded by some of the highest peaks in Switzerland, including the Matterhorn, a mountain so iconic it’s even on the Toblerone packet. We are driven the three and a half hours from Geneva Airport by Nick, resort manager with the bespoke ski company Powder Byrne. I question him closely while keeping my eyes firmly cast down. (Did I mention snowy hairpin bends when I listed my fears? I probably should have.) I ask him, “What are the chances of a cable car falling off?” And, “Does the funicular railway ever lose steam halfway up and then barrel back down to the bottom?” And, “Has a drag-lift ever picked someone up by their collar and then dropped them from 200ft?” And, “If I lost a ski on a ski lift, would it decapitate someone below?” And, “What’s the worst injury you have personally ever seen?” And, lastly, “What say we turn round, go home, and say no more about it?”
Eventually, we arrive, although not in Zermatt itself. You can’t drive into Zermatt because it’s a car-free zone, to prevent air pollution. So you have to park in a nearby village and then take either an electric taxi or horse-drawn carriage. I note the horses wear what appear to be giant nappies. This is probably good for the cleanliness of Zermatt’s streets, but bad for the dignity of the horse, although, as you yourself might rightly ask, who am I to now talk about dignity? I, who have lain on my back and flailed like a hot pink beetle while small children have performed swooshing acrobatics around me? Fair point, well made.
Day One. This is “My Unexpectedly Superb Day”. We’ve hired the boots and the skis, looked meaningfully at billboard maps, and I’m so layered up I’m now 96 per cent zeppelin. We begin our ascent on a funicular railway – “Nick, what are the chances of finding a spider in here?” – then it’s a cable car (don’t look down, whatever you do) and then a flight of steps. You can tell the novice skier because the novice skier can’t walk in ski boots. The novice skier walks up or down steps sideways, while anxiously holding the hand rail. There seem to be quite a few tentative Japanese ladies learning to ski in Zermatt, also anxiously holding hand rails and, as I sidestep around one, I catch her eye, and her look says, “I wish I were at home, composing a haiku.” I give her a sympathetic look back, one which, I think, says: “I know where you are coming from, love. I, too, wish I were at home, composing a haiku, and it’s not even part of my culture! Have you ever thought about pottering about in slippers while secretly turning the heating up? It has its own kind of poetry, you know.”
But then I emerge on the slope and it is beautiful. The sky is a perfect, bright blue. The Matterhorn is magnificent. The air is cold but pure. And the snow forms in soft, glossy peaks, like meringue before you bake it. I want to gather it all up and put it in an oven until it’s crisp on the outside yet gooey in the middle. I would like it here, if only everyone would leave me to do my own thing, but they will not. I must slide about, perilously.
I start with one ski on, propelling myself with my free foot. Then it’s two skis, and a different kettle of fish altogether. Everything you have ever learnt about putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward counts for diddly-squat. Put one foot in front of the other while on skis and you will shoot off, and then fall, and flail. Richard shows me how to get up. You have to sort of haul yourself into a squat and heave yourself up from there. I try. I try even though my knees make alarming crunching sounds, like celery being snapped. (This is audible despite all the clothing.) I can’t do it. I can’t do it because, aside from the knees, I appear to have no lower body strength. Or upper body strength. Or middle body strength. (I believe this may be why sales of my book, Strength Training the Pottering Way, have been rather slow.) I am taught the “snowplough”. It involves pointing the forward tips of your skis together. As it happens, I am rather good at this. I am also taught “turns” because you can’t just bomb straight down a slope. Don’t be dumb.
I am miraculously good at these too. By the afternoon I’m zigzagging down the nursery slope, sometimes reaching speeds of 0.0006mph. I am exhilarated. I think I might be a natural. Have I found my sport at last? I’ve always wanted a sport. At school, I was not only last to be picked for any team, but was so useless and uncoordinated that, when it came to rounders, I was made such an outside, outside fielder I was over the borough boundary and effectively playing truant. Back at the hotel that evening, I even hear my husband – who has been skiing once before, and is already on “parallel turns” – talking on the phone to our teenage son back home. “Yes. Seriously. Mum did really well.”
The hotel is the Mont Cervin Palace and it is splendid, not just fancy but “fancy schmantzy”, as my grandmother would have said. We leave our books with the page corners turned down where we’ve left off reading and when we return to the room, the page has been smoothed out and a bookmark inserted. (Perhaps it is years of turning down my own pages that has made me weak?) The hotel has a pool, a spa and even a naked sauna, although we don’t try that as we are British. Actually, Jude does give it a go, but as he later says proudly, “I took a towel.”
Day Two. This is “My Day of Shame” and we will talk no more about it. Come the evening, I feel despondent. It is a cruel thing, imagining you have found a sport and then having it snatched away from you. I hear my husband talking to our son: “Mum couldn’t do it. She was convinced she was going to shoot into a lake. No. Not a chance in a million.” We do not do the naked sauna. We turn in early and read our bookmarked books in bed. This “après-ski” business is not all it’s cracked up to be, you know. (Once, we did look round the shops, but soon had our fill of pricey if highly accurate timepieces. Hard to believe, but true.)
Day Three, otherwise known as my “Unexpectedly Brave Day”. On my last day of instruction Richard proposes we do a “blue run”. “A blue run?” I query. “Are you insane? Did yesterday not happen for you? Haven’t you heard my knees?” He says my technique is fine, it’s the terror, and the only way to conquer that terror is to keep challenging myself. I love Richard, who has been kind but never patronising. I’d have got nowhere without him. I do the blue run for him, albeit cautiously, and with a running commentary going on inside my head that sounds something like: “Oh, f***. F***, f***, f***.”
I don’t like the precipices. I don’t like the swish of competent skiers coming up from behind. I don’t like the ski boots. (If I could feel my toes, would I feel them clamouring to get out?) But I don’t give up, and perhaps even reach speeds of 0.0007mph. Here is another basic truth about skiing: if you think about it too much you will fall over and if you don’t think about it enough you will fall over, so the trick is to think about it just the right amount. This is a hard thing, but I do manage the blue run four times, with only two falls, and only once having to grab the leg of a passing skier to regain control. (He was fine about it, and even stopped shaking his poles at me eventually.)
I don’t know if I could ever properly enjoy skiing, but when I stand at the base of the blue run, look back and see how far I’ve come I am rather thrilled. And my husband? He loves it. Up and down he goes all day, like the Duracell Bunny, but in wool. (“And even if you do get wet, wool retains its insulating abilities…”) I have never seen him as happy; not even when using vinegar as a cleaning agent instead of chemicals, or religiously hanging the washing out even though we have a tumble dryer. He has asked that we go skiing again next winter and I have said, “Yes. For sure.” Next winter? What are the chances of that happening? Nil, I would say."
Deborah Ross - The Times
