A love letter to skiing
The chef was found in a cupboard, cradling a bottle of vodka, the week before we arrived at the hotel. Despite its grand alpine surroundings the hotel itself had been stripped, by the passage of time and general neglect, of any glamour or allure it may have once had. Breakfast was a stale croissant, lunch was supermarché ham, baguette and boiled eggs snaffled at the foot of a chairlift, dinner was a shared, topping-less pizza. Sometimes your hands might get very cold, your face wind-burnt.
This is the picture I paint for my wife when a perennial debate rears its head in our house; is the ski holiday a cultural and financial shibboleth of middle-class life or simply a chosen type of eminently affordable trip, much akin to a week in the Turkish sun or the maintenance of a static caravan? In a word, is it posh?
In Tourists, her paean to the British holidaymaker, Lucy Lethbridge describes a certain kind of crunchy moral improvement that rings very true when I consider my own upbringing. Referring to what she calls ‘the recreation of the pastoral,’ Lethbridge states:
This is the holiday that requires (an element of) physical hard work;
It is about hiking, cycling, knapsacks, campfires and caravanning …
A happy illusion of splendid solitude and ancient skills.
These were the holidays of my youth, especially those spent in the Alps if the Easter break from school fell early enough in the season; self-catered, purposely edifying and at the end of a momentous travel leg. We would travel with at least one other family and each morning would be an arduous race to make the first open chairlift or gondola ride. ‘First lift up, last lift down’ became a morally-weighted maxim. The equipment was heavy, cumbersome and ungainly; the conditions necessitated regular stockpiling and shedding of layers. Through children’s eyes, the adults that surrounded us were virile, if slightly more temperate, versions of the adventurer Albert Smith, who claimed to have ‘climbed all the way to the top of Mont Blanc on a litre of wine, a bottle of brandy and a dozen hard-boiled eggs.’ I have vivid memories of a replica iron cross medal being handed out daily as a reward for the most impressive physical feat, demonstration of respect for the mountain or show of sporting behaviour.
Perhaps more than its financial burden then, the Ski holiday is emblematic of soft-palmed public servants and white-collar workers revelling in transient physical labour; putting the body through its paces, safe in the knowledge of its imminent return to the classroom, the surgery, the office. I am chastened by the thought of my now-deceased father-in-law’s relationship with holidays. Here was a man who worked physically demanding month-long stints as a contract worker, often in the same cultural centres of mainland Europe, fitting the interiors of aeroplanes. I find myself considering his impeccable workmanship behind a sewing machine, his prized wiry-ness and physical dexterity, the quality of his tools, into the handles of which he had scrawled IVAN, lest anyone try and nick them in the scant hours he wasn’t working. Is it any wonder that his own sun-baked holidays were a movement in the opposite direction; away from enforced labour and towards the promise of doing exactly what you want? Even if that meant absolutely nothing?
Possibly the most offence I have ever seen my wife take is at my dad’s assertion that he was working-class, equating his socialist upbringing, strong work ethic and love of frugality with her modest childhood; secure enough but financially measured in weeks, not months or years and marked by a scarcity mindset. Her recollection of moving from a working-class estate primary school to a leafy grammar underlines the divide of a hidden curriculum; the expectation of prior musical, cultural and sporting experience. In her words, every other girl seemed to play hockey, the flute and the piano. Perhaps skiing then (even a vagabond version where corners were cut to allow for its financial viability) is simply a linear continuation of this divide; engineered physical effort and encoded rules for those whose normal lives seem to naturally transcend both.
This is still a love letter. I am very much grateful for those weeks spent in the French and Italian Alps. They were wholesome and whimsical and instilled in me a respect for nature and a desire to diversify my own family’s exploration of the world. However the jury is well and truly in; they are, resoundingly, posh.
