The eternal question. “So what do you do in the summer?”
It’s a natural question to ask isn’t it?
You’re talking to someone who’s fundamentally only doing a job for the winter. You’d ask a the bloke who drives a road-gritting lorry the same question. You’d ask the guy at the lift station (if lifties didn’t carry such an air of grumpy unapproachability). And you certainly ask a Ski instructor. Or a reindeer. Or Santa’s elves. Or perhaps our Kato.
So what are we doing?
Well, in an ideal world we’d all be sitting in the sunshine on the T-Bar terrace getting sun-burnt, but in this far from ideal world we all disappear off for a moderately nomadic few months.
So Nicol’s dashing between his building project in Le Chable and work all over the UK, Kent’s off touring round Sweden running the family catering business with Jenny and bringing his winning smile to the world of hotdogs and beef burgers.
Olly (who’s thirty today – wish him a happy birthday if you get chance) is off to New Zealand to teach out there for the Southern Hemisphere winter. Rich and Gina are back painting houses (and Rich is probably skiving off a lot to play golf).
Toby’s manning the office and taking Laika for walks in a rather soggy Verbier, Westy’s cooking in the dungeon beneath T-Bar and I’m in an equally rainy Amsterdam writing ads for Heineken (the research is killing me…).
But despite the fact that summer is only just beginning (well, it’s supposed to be here now but seems a wee bit delayed) our conversation’s already turned to winter 2010/2011, pre-season training, new skis and what colour uniforms we should be wearing.
Maybe if the sun decides to grace us with it’s presence we’ll get the bikes out and try not to wish away summer again. But it’s snowing up top today and you can’t help wonder what the glacier’s looking like in Saas Fee…
It reminds me of a quote by Chris Laidlaw, a Kiwi journalist. He was writing about Rugby, but I’ll plagiarize it a bit here…
“[Skiing] may have many problems, but the gravest of them is undoubtedly that of the persistence of summer.”
Not long left now though – only four and a half months before TeleVerbier think about starting the lifts at the weekends…
Indeed. I refer you back to the recent email to James Cove regarding becoming a ski instructor and whether it is a tangible career. He states that unless you want to become a wind battered old single man. you should steer clear..!
T