When I signed up for a two-day “winter walking” course, I mistakenly thought I
already knew how to walk. After all, I’d been at it for half a century or
more.
But no, it wasn’t good enough for Sandra: I had to learn a new way of
perambulating, she said. One that involved a fresh rhythm. And much bigger
steps.
My heart sank at this. I had come with my family to Saas-Fee, in southern
Switzerland, with the express intention of avoiding accented instructors of
any discipline.
My official reason for opting out was simple: the spirit was willing but the
knees were weak. That was partly true – the right is a bit dodgy – but I
also factored in that last time out, I found myself suddenly bored with all
the palaver.
All that endless clomping about in boots that belonged in a Tower of London
torture chamber, humping uncooperative skis around while dressed in more
layers than a millefeuille, had palled. The fact that the
early-morning hordes of ski-clacking students reminded me of nothing more
than a multicoloured rookery of emperor penguins sealed it for me. I won’t
ski again. You can’t make me.
This stance was not popular with the family: competitive wife champed to take
to the slopes again, elder daughter wanted to learn, other daughter and son
had decided that if I didn’t let them try snowboarding, I was up there with
Bing Crosby in the bad-fathering stakes.
Thus bullied, I found Saas-Fee came up as the resort of choice by a process of
elimination. The destination had to cater for someone who didn’t want to
lab-rat it up and down the mountains all week, it had to be high enough to
guarantee snow early in the season for those that did, be a pretty village,
car-free, family-friendly, devoid of too many Chanel ski suits, and
accommodating to both skiers and snowboarders.
Miraculously, Saas-Fee scored well on all counts. My 15-year-old daughter
later complained that her skiing instructor was not the mountain hunk she
had anticipated (“He’s even older than you, Dad”) and that the resort had a
shortage of available “fit” men of her demographic. This, as any parent of a
teenage girl can appreciate, was double-bonus points for Saas-Fee.
Drawbacks? The village itself is in shade for much of the day early in the
season, but it isn’t hard to get up into the sun. There are only a few
winter charter flights to the nearest airport, Sion, an hour away by car (a
Geneva transfer is about three hours). I was also warned that it has a
limited ski area compared with, say, Zermatt and that experts might be bored
with just five black runs. Like I cared.
But, in short, it was perfect... until Sandra started on my troublesome gait.
Although I had declared my intention of spending the days in various bars,
trying to catch up with my own personal avalanche, that of unread back
issues of The New Yorker, I knew I had to find some kind of activity, just
to join in with the you-had-to-be-there stories with the family.
So I went along to the feisty Sandra, who owns Eskimos, the minnow of the two
ski schools in the village, the other being the mighty Moby-Dick of the
Swiss Ski and Snowboard School. I had decided I wanted to snowshoe, but
Sandra told me we needed a fresh fall of snow for that to be worthwhile.
