There’s nothing very posh about skiing when it’s a package holiday in the French alps

Call me a blinkered, moronic, mollycoddled idiot (seriously, I’m fine with this) but I only quite recently realised there was something intrinsically posh about skiing.

Call me a blinkered, moronic, mollycoddled idiot (seriously, I’m fine with this) but I only quite recently realised there was something intrinsically posh about skiing. This isn’t because I grew up doing it; more because I didn’t, really. I thought I knew all about posh pas-times when I was a kid. They were the ones which smelled of waxed jackets and gun oil, which took you into fields in tweed. Skiing, if you lived in Edinburgh, meant a smell of cagoules and mothballs, and the diamond-matted dry slope at Hillend. My sister and I took a course there one holiday. It meant an hour-long, three-bus trek out to the arse-end of nowhere. Elsewhere in the world, Hillend is famous mainly for a particular kind of broken thumb.