‘Are you sure it’s got snow tyres?’ That sentence will be burned into my memory for a very long time. I was standing at the Avis desk at Geneva airport French side, and my boyfriend was grilling the girl behind the counter about the exact spec of the vehicle we were about to drive into the mountains. He asked her the snow tyres question seven times before I stopped counting. Then he started forensic interrogation about the make and model. Upon learning it was not a BMW X5 but something called a Peugeot 4007 he demanded pictures. And if he hadn’t asked, I would have.
Last year, we got stuck in the driveway of our chalet and missed two days’ skiing after Avis packed us off to Chamonix with a vehicle so utterly indisposed to coping with snow it would have won a competition for least snow-proof car on the planet.
‘Yes, yes, snow tyres, yes, yes, snow chains, yes, yes…’ the bored-looking Frenchman behind the desk had droned at us, while looking at his watch as if he were wondering when he could knock off for a Gauloises.
But when we rummaged desperately through the boot for said appliances upon becoming stuck down that slope all we could find was a rusty orange tangled-up mass of twisted metal. So we rang them and they said, ‘Yes, yes, we’ll send you a big four-by-four, yes, yes, it’ll be there in an hour, yes, yes…’
We waited and waited. Until, many hours later, the front door of our little cabin flew open, without so much as a knock, and a man in a leather jacket and corduroy trousers with the fly undone stood wide-eyed in the doorway screaming ‘tête de merde!’ at us.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in