Downhill for generations

My 22-year-old daughter is feeling a little low. Me, too, actually. I’ve just told her there aren’t enough pennies in the coffers to go skiing this season — just as there weren’t last season. I suggested she should get together a group of friends and do it on the cheap but we all know that doing skiing on the cheap means pretending you’re flying down the mountain while parked in your local Costa with a hot -chocolate.

‘We’ll go next year,’ I said. And we will. In fact, I’ve already been in touch with those nice people at -Powder White and I am about to sign up for a 12-berth chalet in Courchevel 1650 that has an open fire, a hot tub on the roof and the promise of freshly baked cake every evening when we get down from the mountain. My children, step-children and all their respective girlfriends and boyfriends will be invited. My wife — who doesn’t ski but likes the scenery — won’t have to boil a kettle or wash a pan for a week.

I’m feeling quite emotional just thinking about it, but that’s because I get quite emotional about skiing. For a start, I’m chuffed that my children still want to ski with me. I’ll be almost 60 by the time we get out there in February 2014. Yes, money comes into it but there’s more to it than that. It’s something we’ve always done together. When I split up with their mother it was the one holiday that worked. We would wake up in the morning, have breakfast and ski all day. Then we would do the exact same thing the next day and so on for a week.

We probably had some tiffs, some awkward silences at lunch, but when we were skiing we were one unit.