“Slidey. I don’t like slidey.”
The moment anyone tells me they’re going skiing, I start to dislike them. This is because I’ve constructed my own imaginary version of a skiing holiday in my head: it involves a fistful of self-satisfied bastards called Dan and Izzy and Sam and Lucy sharing a chalet together, drinking wine while listening to Mark Ronson on Izzy’s iPod speakers, taking 15,000 photos of each other guffawing and pulling silly faces, and occasionally venturing outside to slide down a hill on a pair of glorified planks, at which point with any luck they hurtle headlong into a tree, snapping at least three limbs in the process, and the holiday ends with them lying on their back, twitching like a half-crushed spider, exposed shards of shinbone gleaming in the winter sun as they scream for an air ambulance at the top of their idiot lungs.
Did I mention that Charlie Brooker is right about everything?
I’m in a position where a frankly horrifying number of my friends seem to think that skiing is somehow a socially acceptable pastime, rather than an activity morally equivalent to grave robbing or fucking your nephew’s pet hamster to death (which is what it is).
What’s even worse than their belief that a week-long bout of organised falling down a mountain somehow elevates them above lesser mortals is the six months of cretinous babble that leads up to every skiing holiday. People who I know are normally funny, charming, erudite individuals will turn, at the slightest provocation, into witless bores, drivelling on about entirely imaginary differences in snow quality, as though they were Olympic champions desperate to shave off that extra hundredth of a second from their personal best. Mass emails get sent round analysing every possible option in such military detail that you’d think they were setting off to explore an uncharted region of the Amazon, rather than popping over to France to be pampered for a week along with a few hundred other middle-class Brits in a resort devoted solely to ensuring that nothing unexpected or interesting could ever possibly happen to them. And never in this whole period does it occur to them that taking six months to prepare for an activity in which gravity does most of the work – both in pouring people down the hill, and pouring alcohol down their throats – is something that renders them largely unfit to be members of the human race, rather than something to be smug about.
I am, of course, fully aware that any subject can come across as tedious and annoying when you’re the only person in a group who isn’t interested in it and everyone else is talking about it. Furthermore, I’m aware that this argument has, in fact, been made at length about football, something which I’ll happily talk about for hours on end, and which takes up an even larger amount of the year than skiing preparation does. But as a riposte, I’d like to point out that I’m right and other people are wrong.
So yeah. Skiing is shit, and I wish it would stop turning people I like into half-wits. Global warming, with all its glorious melting, can’t happen soon enough.
