On October 30th 2003, I went skiing on snow for the first time in over eight years, and for the first time ever on an indoor snow slope. Nervous at first, I made my friend Dan go first, and watched as he gently snowploughed down the slope. That approach hadn’t even occurred to me, and so I stood at the top of the “mountain” debating with myself – to snowplough or not to snowplough? I had mastered the basics of parallel skiing in Switzerland, but that had been in 1995, and although I’d been on a couple of dry slopes in the meantime, I hadn’t tried it on snow since. But the snowplough technique would make me look like a beginner, and isn’t image everything?

“Oh well”, I thought, and pushed off, snaking a slow parallel track to the bottom. It seems almost as if it’s like riding a bicycle – you can never really forget how. And so over the next hour and a half, Dan and I took turns to lead the other down increasingly fast improvised runs to the bottom, and my confidence grew up to and beyond the level of my actual ability. We chuckled at the beginners in their safety helmets, as we sped down the slopes at unwise speeds.

Piecing together from the fragments of what I later discovered, here’s my best guess as to what actually happened. I was stood at the top of the slope with Dan. It was his turn to take the lead, and by now the route consisted of an almost straight-line approach to the bottom, with just enough wiggle to slow us to stopping speed by the time we hit the bottom. Oh, and we took in a couple of jumps as well. I watched Dan push off, and followed his tracks on the way down, gliding subtly from side to side in order to keep my speed somewhere slightly below terminal velocity, and I think I must have tried a jump. I actually have no idea.

I have no memory of what happened next, but this is how Dan tells it. He got to the bottom of the slope, managed to stop without falling over, and turned around to watch the end of my run. Except I wasn’t there. He was dimly aware of a few people looking up and saying things like “ooh, that looked nasty”, but wasn’t really paying attention, but looking to see where I’d disappeared to. And then one of the staff was running up the hill to a Barry-shaped mound in the snow, and I was apparently helped to my feet and led slowly down the slope. I have no memory of this.

The first thing I remember is being stood with Dan at the bottom of the hill, and being more than a little confused. Given that I could walk, the woman who had retrieved me obviously decided I was fine, since she’d already disappeared.

“What happened there mate?”, asked Dan.

“When?”

“On the slope. What was all that about?”

“What? Oh. Where are we?”

“Er”…

A first aider was summoned, and I was led into a little back room. Obviously I’d made a cataclysmic mess of the little jump and somehow knocked myself out. And now I had concussion. I’d never had concussion before, so I was quite excited about it. But at the same time I was utterly terrified, wondering whether my memory was ever going to return.

Now someone was asking me questions.

“Do you know where you are?”

Um, well I’m wearing ski boots, so I must be at a ski slope. “Tamworth.” (I knew there was a ski slope in Tamworth, near Derby where Dan lived. We were actually in Milton Keynes, about sixty miles away).

My questioner shot a concerned glance at his colleagues. “Okay, do you know what day it is?”.

Well, if I’m in Tamworth it must be the weekend. “Sunday.” It was Thursday evening.

“Right. What month is it?”

I had nothing to guess with here. Deflated, I admitted I had no idea.

It’s funny looking back, but at the time I saw nothing wrong with trying to guess the answers to the questions. Obviously they were trying to ascertain how amnesiac (?) I had become, but they didn’t know that all my life I have enjoyed being quizzed and questioned through the education system and beyond, and am using to making educated guesses when I don’t know the answer. Next time, I think I’ll try to behave and just tell them I don’t know.

An ambulance was called for, and I was excited again. I’d never been in an ambulance. I knew my name, my date of birth, and recognised Dan, but I had no idea where I was, and was only dimly aware that it was 2003.

In the ambulance, things thankfully started to come back to me. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”. The paramedic confirmed that, indeed it was. Arriving at the hospital I was bundled into a wheelchair, despite my protestations that my legs were perfectly fine thank you. So through reception I was wheeled, and into the waiting room, where my wheelchair was parked at the end of a row of plastic seats, and where I attracted quite a few bewildered glances. I was still wearing full ski gear – boots, salopettes, gloves, the works. The highlight was probably when I needed to pee, and so got up out of my wheelchair, and shuffled to the toilet in my ski boots, before shuffling back again and sitting back guiltily into the entirely unnecessary wheelchair…

By this point I had recovered my memory completely, and fortunately the doctor agreed. I was discharged, and made the long trek home. In ski boots.

I never remembered the incident itself – there’s just a gap in my memory. I never even found a bump on my head so that I could work out where I’d been hit. I finally skied again a few weeks ago, at the same slope, only a year and a half after the incident. Again, we ignored the safety helmets, but this time largely avoided the jumps…