And so it Begins

The slopes are open.  It was a mission getting up them though.  Winston Churchill knew what he was on about when he said ‘France, a great country wasted on the French’.  Here they are with 300km of maintained slopes, 2 glaciers & all within 10,000 hectares of pristine mountains.  It’s been here forever, unsurprisingly it was the English that brought the world skiing as a recreation, but being France they like to do things their own way, which is invariably slowly.  I don’t know how long Val D’isere has had chair lifts which you need a ‘ski pass’ to use but it must be over 50 years.  In all this time, year after year there is estimated to be around 30,000 people a day using these lifts during peak times.  You would of thought they would be able to sell (for actual real cash) these lift passes without too much of a problem.  We didn’t, but we were very, very wrong.   1^st we were told it would take 5 days to process our lift passes as we are seasonairs & need a 6 month pass.  The ticket office didn’t open 5 days early so that we could ski on the opening day.  No the lazy tw#ts didn’t open till the day before, at 4pm.  But they still couldn’t get us a pass because they did have the right paperwork.  They told us come back in the morning & it would be sorted then, she also said we needed to photo for their records.  I had some passport photos but the wife didn’t so we asked where we could find a photo-me-booth type arrangement.  There isn’t 1.  Anywhere.  We thought this a bit odd so we produced my photos.  ‘Oh no’ she said, ‘we don’t need them it’s done on a web camera’.  Why make a fucking point of needing photo’s when you don’t need fucking photo’s.  We went back the next day and it being France we took every single piece of documentation with us (they didn’t tell us we needed it but they love a bit of red tape, the French), they wanted our works contract (we don’t have a job), our proof ownership of property (we are renting, as are the thousands of other residence) the French equivalent of National insurance (we not fucking French) & a breakdown of our genetic code (I might of made that last 1 up, but the rest is true).   We finally managed to convince them that we just wanted to buy the season long pass (the kidz who rep & other such tw#ts get a discounted rate, we knew we couldn’t get this so we weren’t even trying to blag it) after taking down every single piece of information our sad little lives have ever produced & a good hour we eventually got our passes.  Let me remind you that they would have to do this many, many thousands of times, it’s not just because we’re English either, all the French people were having exactly the same problem & they would of been doing it every year of their lives.  Any way anyway, enough of the Chris Moyles style rant (as in, long winded & un-funny), we’re here for the mountains & now we can get to them.

The 1^st afternoon up on the slopes was a tough, tough ride.  Visibility was terrible, it was -20 plus a 30mph wind, the slopes were hard & patchy, lots of ice & mounds of powder, I was hungover & my boarding was shite.  We stayed out for a few hours then called it a day after I face planted into a pile of Ice on a flat run.  Incidentally, this wasn’t the 1^st fall of the holiday.  Whilst in the apartment Skyping the Sister-in-law from the comfort of our sofa the wife got up & on her way to the kitchen she tripped over the power cable & landed flat on her face & smashing her remaining good knee, she has a habit of falling over (ask anyone who knows her about the sign outside a busy pub!) but somehow this wasn’t as funny as normal. 

Sunday was a much better day.  It was only -10 degrees very little wind & we could see.  We was without hangovers & got up the mountain early to enjoy a full days boarding.  We went to a different area & the conditions were actually pretty good.  I’d swapped & tweaked with my snowboard so it was all set up for a fat lad on hard snow & we had a brilliant day.  We stuck to mostly green & blue runs where the snow was best & we soon got back into the groove of carving out some tidy turns & we finished it all off with a few beers in a lovely little bar at the end of the day.  This is what it’s all about.  & to top it all off, we beat the Scouse 2-1 with a 94^th minute goal from the little lad Lennon.  Life is good.  I’m not going into work next week, too much snow!

Update

This f#cking blog shit is starting to p#ss me off.  Who ever designed blogger has clearly not lived in the real world, nothing is easy or straight forward.

Any way after much swearing I have attached a few photo's to the older blogs, check them out, if only to see the cock.

The Road Trip

This was nothing like those crappy American movies full of high jinks & cheerleader troops flashing their t*ts at us as we overtook their coach, mores the pity.  It was 12 hours of motorway driving through rural French country side.  This was very similar to diving through our own country, shouldn’t really surprise me but hey, the only difference being the lack of traffic jams & hold ups.

  The day started off at 5am where I had to use all those years of Tetris skills to load the contents of a 3 bedroom house into a 4 seater car.  The amount of crap we took really is unbelievable.  There was not a space left unfilled with shit.  We had a washing machine, ironing board, clothes airier, more clothes the M&S, 2 snowboards, the wife’s 500 pairs of shoes, 7 books that we’ve read before, half our kitchen, a fridge freezer & a cuddly toy.  Maybe not all of that but the list is more generation game than holiday check list.  It wasn’t until we unpacked that the full extent of the useless shit became apparent.  Not just the wife either.  I brought 4 watches (1 doesn’t work) 7 coats, a DVD player when there’s 1 in the room & on my laptop & even an odd sock.  An odd f#cking sock, how did that happen?  Once we’d unloaded the car we had the hellish task of getting it into our apartment.  We had to go up a flight of steps into the entrance, up another flight of steps to the lift, send it up in the lift (me loading on the ground floor, wife unloading on the 1^st floor), into the apartment then into ever available nook & cranny a 1 bed flat has to offer.  In all fairness it has all fitted in but if we use half of what we’ve bought I’ll be amazed. 

I think I’ve managed quit well on the whole France thing, it was a good 10 hours in before I had a rant about the useless French, I’m sure it won’t be my last.  We then had to suffer the indignity of loosing football to the garlic munching surrender monkeys (see), luckily our TV hasn’t got a power cable yet so we missed it.  I also managed to miss the mighty Lilywhite’s trounce the Arse.  Again.  Champions league on Wednesday, shant be missing that.

Back to the arrival, it was at night so we couldn’t really see a lot & we were both knackered so we couldn’t even be bothered to go out for an arrival beer so it was early to bed.  When we got up though it was to a scene that confirmed we’d done the right thing, we were home.  The mountains were giving of that readybrek glow & the sky was filled with snow floating down in front of our full height, full width windows .  It snowed all the 1^st day & the village was looking great, the slopes need plenty more on them but with a week till opening day we’re still hopeful.

veiws from our balcony

Our 1^st few days have been spent generally lazing about, getting the lie of the land.  Drinking & eating & meeting other seasonairs.  A bunch of holiday company reps turned up the other day.  They are so young, no wonder so many people’s holidays end in tears.  All students on a gap year being paid by loans or mummy & daddy, let’s see how long it is till they p#ss me off.   I also experienced the 1^st dose of snowboard snobbery.  Like many of us my snowboard only gets used 1 or 2 weeks of the year, I bought a new 1 in January but when in the bar discussing with a young lad (with his baseball cap pulled over his ears!) he said ‘oh what last year’s model’.  The little tw#t, the pisser of it all though, he’s probably brilliant as well.  I bet I could down a beer quicker than him though.



Home sweet home

Morning Benders

What’s the point of a blog?  None.  All blogs are full of self-indulgent boasts of people’s sad little lives that no one really cares about.  My blog though, my blog is going to be no different what so ever.  I wasn’t going to bother doing one at all, it was only after reading the wife’s that full of shoes, shopping & sex in the shitty that I felt the world needs balance.  So this is going to be my little piece of Ying to her Yang.   It is to say all the bollocks that I would normally spill out to my mates over a few beers in the pub.  So with that in mind, this will be fully devoid of fact but full of opinion, nonsense & outright lies loosely based on the wife & me leaving the county & living a life in the French Alps.

So a quick account of what’s been happening in my life in the last year.  I have been working as surveyor on a large building site in east London.  There are privacy rules about this particular site which I’m not sure about so I can’t possibly say what site it was.  Let’s just say it is a very large sport related site that has to be complete by 2012 so that athletes from all over the world can compete in various ‘games’ (you’ll never guess where).  My contract was due to be up towards the end of the year & what with the country going to shit & both the wife & me needing to get out of the ridiculous money driven work obsessed life that seems to breed in this country (unless your an unemployed single mother addicted to Heroin then you can be given your own house, money, food vouchers because you can’t be trusted to spend the handouts on essential & even your H supplement).  We have done a year backpacking before & it was always our intention to do a season in the Alps.  So we sold our house, furniture & car (this is a long a tedious story in itself, I can’t bear to regale it makes me feel sick) rented an apartment in Val d’Isere in France & here we are.

I finished work on the 12^th November, although I probably stopped working sometime before that, it wasn’t intentional it was just hard to concentrate when I had such a big move on.  Who am I kidding; I’m just a bit of a work shy waster.  I can’t say I was sad to leave, 2 and half years on that site is enough for anyone, but I would be leaving behind some good new friends.  Being a man though we can never say that; so I called them a bunch of  c#nts punched them on the arm & marched out calling behind me ‘so long losers’.  But for the record & with the witness of all 6 people that will end up reading this (4 of which are family) I want it noted that I meant every word of it, but that’s no bad thing.

Then on to all the goodbyes of the friends & family.  At no point did I ever regret the decision to leave but that doesn’t make it any easier to leave the people you’ve known all your life, sometimes longer!  We had the obligatory boy’s night out.  The usual, down the local pub, into a bar then into a dodgy club.  The difference this time that 1 of my stupid mates thought that the wife & all her friends had finished for the night (they were having a night in with wine & gossip, probably comparing boobs & touching each other) so we should go back there, nightclubs never really been my thing & we’re all in our 30’s now & can’t really talk with all that racket I jumped at the chance.  But bugger me they were still all there squawking & cackling, arguing who’s done the most roller-blading whilst on the blob & all that girl shite that we will never understand (somebody told me to try listening once, fuck that it’ll make my ears bleed).  It turned out to be the usual drunken ending most weekends turn into, insulting  each other, drinking games & shaving a cock into my mates chest hair.      

The family was done over a couple of nights, both over dinner & both a rather civil affair.  I was expecting a few more tears but everybody was fine, even my mum, maybe they were pleased to get rid of me after all.  Or more likely they were pleased to see someone actually attempting to change their life instead of moaning about it.

Don’t get me wrong here.  We had a good life & I enjoyed it almost all the time but our out-looked changed.  We were both working long hours (as before when I say working long hours, what I mean is that I was at work for long hours, work was just something to past the time between chatting,  fuzzing a ball about & generally arsing around).  I worked early & the wife finished late which meant we didn’t seem to see much of each other, it did however, give me plenty of time to review the numerous porn sites that are talked about, but that’s for another time.  We didn’t earn bad money but what we did earn we wasted on too many clothes, holidays & going out just to justify the fact we’re out the house for near on 60 hours a week.  There must be more to life than that, so we’re giving it a go.

1 more thing.  This is my 1st blog & I'm doing it in a cafe with limited battery.  When I get internet at home I will pad it out some more.

Take care benders