The instructors double-teamed our boarding class for week three. Twelve of us were hounded and harried through deep snow and rocky gullies by the galvanic Sandrine and the enigmatic Vincent. Vincent was defined by his ski-slope nose, and the hispid mucous icicles that hang below it. Sandrine was the bouncy cheerleader of the group, and told us that things were “coooool” and constantly laughed and asked my legs and board if they were fine as they protruded vertically from the snow. I generally lied and responded with a new french way of saying that I was excellent, marvellous, fantastic.
We needed two instructors – one to show us a decent route through the rocks, and another to bring up the rear and make sure any stragglers could dig themselves out of whatever snow drift they had planted their faces into. The stragglers were generally R and I.
Week three saw my body build up a tolerance to the cocktails of codeine, paracetemol and ibuprofen that had previously helped me float on the deep snow. By Wednesday I had started topping them up with extra ibuprofen and chocolate on the mid-lesson chairlift. My legs were about two million years before jelly in the evolutionary process by the end of Thursday’s two and a half hour tour of virgin powder. R and I had been the snow anchors of the group, trying to swim and dig ourselves out of self-made craters as the other ten sat waiting for us as usual. Sandrine summed it up, “No good. When you ‘ave no legs, you ‘ave no legs.”
On Friday, we waited for Vincent and Sandrine to arrive and start the lesson. As normal, we had assembled by the markers which denoted the experience level of the students. A new boarder turned up and asked if our group was the advanced off-piste group. I didn’t think so, but a Dutch guy in our group corrected me. I looked at the markers again, and noticed for the first time that our group was in fact assembled by the marker labeled “Advanced Performance Snowboard”. This marker was right next to the one labeled “Snowboard 2”. The former is for head cases who have been boarding for four years, and can do anything on any surface. The latter is for intermediates who have two weeks of experience. “What kind of idiot puts these two markers next to each other?” I thought to myself.
The lesson started and we took a few lifts to get above the clouds. On a third lift, I quizzed Sandrine about the markers and the fact that we had clearly been in the wrong group for the last six days. She admitted that R and I were at the bottom of the group, and didn’t have half as much experience as the other students. She’d let us stay because we had motivation and good humour and spirit. Amazing what sort of trouble painkillers and lies can get you into I thought, as we exitted the Stannah chairlift, and headed under an orange rope which cordonned off a steep and rocky crevice. Italy was below us, and the sign on the rope said, “Danger, do not cross”. Beyond lay a near vertical descent.