The Times Companion to 2017

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The Times Companion to 2017 Page 18

by Ian Brunskill


  I have a preparatory lesson indoors at Chel-Ski in London, and while being taught how to put on skis and the basics of how to stop by forming skis into a pizza slice-shaped wedge, I can’t help but notice that ski boots resemble plaster casts. In Geneva airport I can’t help but notice the number of people returning from ski trips in actual plaster casts. In the drive up to Megève I note that the taxi driver says he has never skied himself, despite being a local, because he “can’t afford to hurt himself”.

  It’s enough. The knife has clasped, my goal going from having a bit of a laugh to not being in a wheelchair by day four. On the junior slope, among the hundreds of toddlers and children who are my companions for the week, my preternaturally upbeat and charming ski teacher, Guillaume, does his best to calm my nerves. He tells me that as well as teaching children and the very rich (some of his time is spent waiting around in chalets just in case millionaires decide they want a ski lesson), he recently taught an 82-year-old Russian man to ski. He informs me that he has a relaxed and holistic approach to teaching that he calls “emoski” and is informed by yoga, martial arts and “sophrology”, a healthcare philosophy consisting of physical and mental exercises that create a prepared mind and focused body. He describes skiing as “dancing with the mountain with your magic foot” and has a line in semi-comprehensible but nevertheless soothing motivational sayings, such as: “I never have an injured person, because I respect the rhythm of the person.”

  And: “Every new action on the snow makes you new.” And: “You can wear a helmet. It is law in America. But you might as well make the most of being free here.”

  And: “Skiing is an extension of the natural. It is an occasion to get into a new state of constuteness [sic].”

  And finally, if not inevitably: “Let’s not report this injury because there will be too much paperwork.”

  For I am only a few hours into skiing before I cut my left thumb open. It’s entirely my fault — Guillaume has warned how sharp skis can be: “The ski is like a huge knife.” But I am too warm and have removed my gloves. Indeed, of all the many surprises about skiing, such as the fact that lots of ski resorts use artificial snow, that you can ski uphill as well as downhill, that mountains are subject to droughts, that it is more painful and difficult to get up after you have fallen than to fall down, that people actually make snowmen and have snowball fights on slopes, that people go skiing in March, that skiing holidays are essentially self-cancelling, in that the better you get at skiing, the quicker you come down the mountain and the longer you spend not skiing, the single most unexpected thing is that you are too warm most of the time. Or to be more accurate: your head is too cold, while your feet feel prepared for a moon landing as your torso roasts.

  I remove some clothes for relief and, before I know it, I am on my back for the 16th time in 90 minutes, this time the snow around my hand resembling raspberry ripple. It’s not serious, but there is quite a bit of blood, I can’t hold a knife for a fortnight and, as I am taken for unofficial first aid, I see someone with a more serious injury being ferried down the slope. Guillaume attempts reassurance, remarking, “There can’t be more than two people stretchered off this mountain on any day; it is nothing.” Which strikes me as something you wouldn’t have to say about a beach holiday. Or my preferred activity: staying at home and reading.

  To be frank, if I had travelled alone I would have given up. But because I’m here with my girlfriend, who has skied a little before and we are at that stage of a relationship when I am still pretending to be a better, braver person than I actually am, I continue in one-handed, bloodied agony, progressing in the space of a day from being unable to put on my skis without falling down to being unable to move forwards 3ft without falling down, all the while being overtaken by supersonic toddlers.

  The second day is even more of a killer, in part because the hotel is so lovely. Research informs me that Megève was apparently developed in the Twenties as a “response to Switzerland’s irritatingly swanky St Moritz” and that while “Courchevel took over as France’s top resort, Megève’s smart hotels still attract the old money”. But I’d like to pay it the ultimate compliment by saying it is even prettier than the town in the video for Wham’s Last Christmas. We stay in two different hotels owned and run by the Sibuet family, which are swanky beyond belief, with roaring fires at every turn, animal skins draped on funky furniture, pedigree dogs belonging to the rich guests available to pet in corridors, exquisite food (having oysters on a mountain is, I think, the most decadent thing I have ever done) and staff with brilliant teeth for whom nothing is a problem, whether it is lighting fires in your room, bandaging your hands or fitting and warming your ski boots. The only problem is that we have to leave the comfort and luxury to go bloody skiing.

  The challenge of day two is intensified by my injury and the fact that Guillaume is not around in the morning to carry our skis, to tell us where to go and to pick us up as we fall down every 30 or 40 seconds or so. It pretty much takes us three hours to get dressed, leave the hotel and get on to the junior slope, our journey being slowed down at various points by the sudden realisation that we probably need to arrange winter-sports travel insurance and that we probably need to hire helmets. When we finally arrive and put on our skis I promptly fall down again, this time getting stuck beneath the plastic orange feet of a blow-up cartoon character put up for the children, a line of surly French parents glaring down at me witheringly, and my beloved partner plugging on ahead, failing to respond to my pathetic pleas for help.

  In the end, a seven-year-old gets me back on my feet and, when I finally catch up, there is an argument. We are still bickering when Guillaume turns up at the mountaintop café as arranged at 13.13, and he begins explaining why he likes to meet at such specific times.

  “Because time is something that can be strange while skiing: one minute can be hour; one hour one minute, and it has an impact on consciousness. We are connecting to a different reality, and time is an abstraction.”

  Near by a small child complains that his sausage sandwich has not come, as he requested, in focaccia, and in that moment I hate everything about skiing. The way the public-school types around us seem to consider it compulsory to spray everyone with snow as they pull up to the restaurant. The incomprehensible terminology for the lifts, the funiculars, gondolas, chairlifts and T-bars, which is perhaps even more impossible than getting on and off the damned things. The ski food — what is raclette after all, if not just a glorified pizza topping, or skiing in food form, involving, as it does, a great deal of faff and potential injury as you assemble it yourself on your own table. I hate that a light lunch can cost €180. That just after you have spent a fortune, there is always one more thing to pay for, whether it is a ski pass or helmet hire. That after my legs have been twisted in ways they have never twisted, and after I have been forced to use muscles I didn’t realise I even had, I am aching in ways that didn’t seem imaginable.

  Eventually, Guillaume picks up on the tension. “This first time is very intensive. It is like a washing machine of emotion,” he soothes. “You feel so many things. We have fear, pain; we don’t know where we go; couples and families always argue … We think we can deal with emotions but they are stronger than us.” He says that the previous day, a woman in her forties had cried for an entire day of tuition, and offers more motivational statements, which include: “In skis, as in life, we have no default, the body make it best, to do what we want … Sometimes we are too rude with ourselves, you get a bit upper level than you realise.”

  And: “It’s like we are planting a seed: we can never hang it to make it grow. You can never, what do you say in English, force? When something start to grow, you cannot hang it to make it grow faster. You have to give it water, give it your best energy.”

  And: “The breathing is the key for everything. If you blow through your emotion, you have the energy to use it, to make sure you are not catched by the angriness or the danger.”

  “An
griness” is mainly what I feel. I complain about the cost of the coffee. And the Nineties techno that would embarrass even 2 Unlimited, but is somehow deemed passable on the slopes. But Guillaume does a clever thing at this point: sensing that we are demoralised by being outskied by toddlers, and going up and down the “magic carpet lift” with schoolchildren, he takes us on to a proper slope, which features long easy green runs and less easy blue runs, plunging us in at the deep end. Or rather, throws us down a steep slope.

  Slowly but surely, still falling over every few minutes, we make our way down a 2km slope in a blizzard. Looking back at the phone footage we are still absolutely pathetic at skiing: I doubt we exceed two or three miles an hour at any stage. We do almost the whole thing with the aid of the pizza-wedged snowplough move, the sure sign of a beginner, with people zooming furiously around us as we destroy their masturbatory enjoyment.

  But there are moments of parallel skiing, occasionally we manage to look up from our skis, and I suddenly get the point.

  On the way home I read an interview in the in-flight magazine for Swiss airlines with two ski stars who talk about the thrill of enjoying a “well-prepared piste”, how when they are skiing they “can shut out everything else”, the excitement of “the sheer speed” of skiing, and I know what they mean. The feeling of gliding down a slope, in snow or bright sunshine, the fresh air against your face, is amazing. I’d equate it to managing your first 10k run without stopping, or perhaps to driving a Ferrari for the first time, and towards the end of the second day I have the feeling I had as a kid when it was snowing, and I was playing outside, and my mum called me in, and I didn’t want to go home.

  Not that the feeling lasts, or that it sticks for very many people at all. According to a survey published by the National Ski Areas Association, 83 per cent of first-time skiers and snowboarders never become enthusiasts.

  But in the days that follow I manage to see the positives. The scenery is sensational. Vin chaud is delicious: like alcoholic Lemsip. It’s cool how you can refill your mineral water bottles on ski slopes from streams running with water of better quality than Evian. But God, the pain. And the interminable falling over. It just never ends. All that essentially changes between days one and four is that the causes for my falls become more ambitious: by the end I am falling over while trying to make videos on my phone and eating, rather than slipping over because I can’t fasten my skis. And there is no getting over the fact that the single best moment of the holiday is the ten minutes it takes to get out of ski boots on the final day, having physically survived the whole thing.

  Which brings me back to the question of race and why brown people don’t ski in huge numbers. I actually think class is the more pertinent issue: I know more Indians who ski nowadays than people from inner-city Wolverhampton. But it comes up quite a bit. Before I go, a friend jokes that we Asians are genetically incapable of coordinating our legs in a V while moving (“I mean, when in the Indus Valley has such a movement ever been required? We’re trudgers, carriers and squatters”). Another remarks: “You will be the only brown person on the slopes as I’m not going this year. It’s quite the responsibility.” The photographer spots graffiti on a ski lift pronouncing, “No brothers in the powder”, which could be a threat or a simple statement of fact. My girlfriend gets asked by someone who works on the slopes whether she is my minder, presumably because the only other brown people around are princes from the Middle East, who have western minders.

  Online, there are long Quora posts putting the lack of ethnic enthusiasm for skiing down to everything from a loathing of cold weather to the cost and tradition, while my colleague David Aaronovitch has put the Jewish aversion to winter sports down to the fact that his people “are particularly uninterested in endangering ourselves for fun”, that Catholics, in comparison, “have a steady belief in their entitlement — given some properly observed formalities — to the afterlife”, and that they “might be said to have few natural predators”.

  Theology, however, can’t really explain the Indian lack of interest; if anything, our belief in reincarnation should mean that we are throwing ourselves down mountains in the Himalayas in our millions. For what it’s worth, I’d put it down to the extraordinary faff that skiing involves. If my Punjabi family are anything to go by, Indians are incapable of doing anything without a large degree of fuss at the best of times. As a kid, even a picnic in the park had to be planned with the kind of precision and detail that Steven Spielberg usually reserves for a film shoot: hours to make the food; hours to pack the necessary dal, parathas and samosas into carrier bags, and additional hours for calling around in case anyone else wanted to join. But given that skiing inherently involves so much preparation, from the purchase of clothing, to the fitting of clothing, to the daily replacement of clothing, the booking of ski passes, the fitting of ski boots, the arranging of travel insurance and first aid, and so tediously on, it is just an impossible prospect for many Indians. Most Punjabi families would not even make it to the slope on a conventional ski holiday.

  I realise, however, that for some enthusiasts the occasional moments of bliss are worth the effort, just as for some people classic-car ownership, with its breakdowns and discomfort, is worth it for occasional afternoons of pleasurable motoring. I also realise that for some people, especially the English upper classes, the faff is the point: for not only does skiing give them the perfect excuse to indulge the English predilection for talking about the weather, it also gives them a way of not engaging with their families in any meaningful way while on holiday. Basically, it’s a very expensive form of emotional repression. If you’re one of the people who need this, fair enough. Have fun on your next trip. Break a leg.

  GIVING BIRTH IS A LETHAL GAMBLE IN VENEZUELA

  Lucinda Elliott, Caracas

  MARCH 21 2017

  THERE ARE PLENTY of reasons to avoid getting pregnant if you live in Venezuela.

  So impoverished has the country become that maternity units cannot afford to feed expectant mothers from Friday afternoon until Monday lunchtime. Antibiotics, blood pressure treatments and painkillers are a rarity. Medical staff have to reuse surgical gloves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, maternal mortality is soaring, up 43 per cent in three years.

  Angeyeimar, a 30-year-old primary school teacher from Caracas, is expecting her second baby, a boy, in April and arrived for a routine appointment at a private clinic, having been turned away twice before. The first time there was no running water, the second no electricity.

  “It’s all a bit of a waste of time at this stage,” she said. “It wasn’t like this with the first-born.”

  Angeyeimar should be one of the lucky ones. Like many middle-class families, she took advantage of the private healthcare perks offered by her employer. About 37 per cent of Venezuela’s 31 million people are covered by private medical insurance, according to a quality-of-life survey last year.

  The deep recession has, however, taken its toll on private obstetrics. As the cost of private care soars, premiums rise and quality declines, Venezuelans are throwing themselves at the state system, which is already on its knees.

  Angeyeimar had her first son eight years ago in another private clinic and recalls that the care was “exceptional”. Since the socialist movement — known as Chavismo, or the cult of Hugo Chávez, the late president — swept the nation at the turn of the century local manufacturing has collapsed and currency controls have made imports scarce. For pregnant women, drugs to control blood pressure, to prevent seizures and to relieve pain, such as Demerol, are scarcely available, either in a private clinic or a state maternity unit.

  For Ana, a 29-year-old first-time mother, the shortages were clear early in her pregnancy. She paid 30,000 bolivars (£8 using the unofficial black market exchange rate) for a private ultrasound scan. “They don’t print the picture because there’s never any paper,” she said.

  Ana has not seen any nappies for sale in her upmarket Caracas neighbourhood of Altamira since she
became pregnant five months ago. A 32-pack of disposable nappies is being sold for 40,000 bolivars (£10) via the popular Instagram account Todoparachamos (“everything for little ones”), the equivalent of the monthly minimum wage.

  Supermarkets and pharmacies no longer stock nappies because of government restrictions on imports so online shops that source baby products from abroad — predominantly provided by the wealthy after trips to Miami and Panama City — are replacing traditional vendors. The alternative is to barter with illegal street sellers.

  Women spend much of their pregnancy scouring their neighbourhoods to try to stock up on milk formula, vitamins and medicines.

  Securing a delivery room bed in a private hospital will cost 700,000 bolivars (£150). Ana’s insurer no longer provides 70 per cent of the cost of a pregnancy and, unable to afford the fee, the vast majority of expectant mothers are turning to the state. However, admitting yourself to a public hospital in Venezuela comes with previously unthinkable risks.

  In Maternidad Concepción Palacios — the biggest public maternity hospital in Caracas and the first of its kind in Latin America — a long-serving epidemiologist who declined to be named told The Times that the unit lacked medical equipment and trained anaesthetists. She said that the list of risks to the life of a pregnant woman and her baby once inside the hospital was “endless” but included dirty operating tables, used surgical gowns and gloves.

 

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