Yesterday I finally returned to the indoor snow slope where I managed to hospitalise myself on the last visit, a year and a half earlier. That’s another story, which I will eventually write up here have posted here: Wipeout.

A flood of memories from long-past skiing trips to Switzerland came back to me, as I remembered just how uncomfortable ski boots are. I finally found some poles short enough for my pint-sized form (ok, 5′9-ish), and stumbled onto the snow.

I hate the fact that the first thing you have to do after not skiing for years is to get on the button lift. I get so irritated when someone else messes up dismounting at the top, stopping the lift for everyone else, that I end up getting increasingly paranoid that I’m going to do the same thing myself. Fortunately, I didn’t.

In fact I stayed on my feet for the full two hours, didn’t cut anyone up, effortlessly impressed myself with parallel turns, and achieved some pretty impressive speeds – I even made a couple of jumps towards the end. Two hours seemed like ten minutes.

I need to start doing this sort of thing more often…