The Times Companion to 2017 by Ian Brunskill

Author:Ian Brunskill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

WHAT’S A NICE ASIAN BOY DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS?

Sathnam Sanghera

MARCH 18 2017

IN NEUROLOGY, MEDICAL professionals sometimes talk about the “clasp-knife response”, a term that describes how, during an examination, certain joints will not budge at all but then suddenly give way. Some writers have, in turn, used the phrase to describe patterns of emotional response to serious medical diagnoses, although, at risk of trivialising its use, I can’t help but feel that it also encapsulates my feelings about learning to ski at the age of 40.

One minute I am, in a state of cheerful cluelessness, rather looking forward to the whole thing; the next I am dreading it more than an avalanche. Though to describe myself as clueless would be to understate things. Growing up in Wolverhampton, and knowing no one who skied, my references come almost entirely from the ZX Spectrum game Horace Goes Skiing and TV chat show interviews with Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards. I know so little about winter sports that when I am sent to the World Economic Conference in Davos as a news reporter in my twenties, I go in my office brogues, somehow not realising that there will be snow in a ski resort, and spend all my time falling over. The first time I try on my borrowed ski clothes (thank you, Mountain Warehouse), I put everything on at once, more than five layers, not realising that each set of thermals is for a different day.

What am I thinking? Not much. If I imagine anything at all, it is sporting a nice anorak in a snowy scene reminiscent of the video for Wham’s Last Christmas. But then I can’t help but notice that the ski jacket features “technology that makes you searchable in the event of an avalanche”, which is not as reassuring as the manufacturer seems to think it is. When I ask for beginners’ advice on Facebook, the responses, while encompassing the random (“Never eat the yellow snow”) and the racial (“You are evolutionarily designed for the Punjab plains: it’s hot, dry and flat. Skiing is not”), mainly dwell on pain and injury. As a result I google so much safety advice that algorithms begin emailing me articles about celebrity ski deaths (Michael Kennedy, aged 39, in Aspen, Colorado; Sonny Bono, aged 62, Heavenly, Nevada; Natasha Richardson, aged 45, Mont Tremblant, Quebec).

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.

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