Back to basics

After the 1 & only comment I had on the last post I have reread some of my previous blogs & I think they have been too serious by far & we need to get back to talking about what makes us happy, that is Beer, boobs, Boarding & insulting the French.

1^st of all lets cover the ever beautiful, medicinal & fun inducing qualities of Booze.  Like back at home I try & have a mid week drink then a few over the weekend.  As I work the weekend I tend to have a few on Thursday/Friday.  But unlike at home I do have a beer with lunch or dinner almost everyday.  The past week was fairly typical.  Beer with lunch everyday then Tuesday night the wife & I polished off a couple of bottles of wine & few Gins.  I have been lucky lately & avoided hangovers, not this time though, a nagging head-of-doom all day.  I’m blaming the French wine, they cant even do that right.  Then Thursday night (St Patrick’s Day) we went out for a few.  Started of in the Lodge bar (our local) where we meet some of the wife’s colleague’s & a few of their clients (a bunch of lads with a very sad man trying to chat up the wife’s mate who is about 60 & looks it).  We then meet up with a few of my mates & hit the drink properly, as with at home everybody came back to ours & we polished off 2 bottles of Gin as well as the beer.  It was a very drunken & funny night that eventually ended at 4am (unfortunately no roads were closed during the evening).  I woke up about 11 & MY GOD what was going on with my head.  It was like the Val D’Isere bell tower had relocated inside it & the monks were trying to recapture there lost your & recreating some punk classics in there.  Dam.  We were heading over to Tignes to watch the X-games but I found out I had to go into work instead.  I didn’t want to do either; all I wanted to do is hide under a table with a crash helmet on & rock gently till the inevitable death came along.  But no, I missed the X-Games & had to go into work, not only that I was on my own for the 1^st time & I also had to drive the van!  It was the longest 2 hours of my life but I made it & I only run a few tourists over so that’s ok.

On next to the Boobs.  It was not the boobs that made this though.  On Sunday evenings, as part of my ski technician profession, we go round to the best Chalet’s in Val.  As mentioned before these are in excess of €35,000 per week & as we all know the rich managed to afford shallow girls who just so happen to have some redeeming features.  It doesn’t happen very often but last week we arrived at 1 of the better 1’s.  All the people were supper friendly & it was quit a pleasant fitting.  During the middle of it the people who had there own equipment came down to the boot room to unpack their ski gear.  This 1 particular women was very difficult to miss but being the professionals that we are we carried on without too much drooling.  She was stunning & in very tight see through clothing, she had just bought new ski boots (or her boyfriend had just treated her to) & she wanted me to fit them to her skis & could I check her boyfriends for him.  A little while later the boyfriend turned up.  My boss likened him to ‘an aging hippy’.  Which I think is a fair assessment of him.  An old man with long bleached hair covered in fake tan with numerous beads, necklaces & cross draped round his neck below an open shirt with 3 or 4 too many buttons un done.  As we drove away we both exuberantly lamented the wonders of this young bit of stuff & expressed our confusion of how the aged hippy come to be with her.   The following day we found out that the aged hippy was Nicky Clarke, the multi award winning celebrity hairdresser & she was his new girl friend, 22 years younger.  In the words of Mrs Merton ‘I wonder what she see’s in the multi millionaire Nicky Clarke’.

We’re here to board so I ought to mention what’s been going there.  I have more or less given up with the board park, I’m too old & too rubbish so I’ve been sticking to slopes & doing little tricks off the sides.  I’m pretty confident on any slope know & even blasted down the Face (a black run which is the steepest down hill run on the world cup circuit) the other day.  Pissed it.  But just 2 runs later, on a simple Blue run I had my biggest fall of the season so far.  I was just doing some gentle carving but & high speed after just shooting out the end of a wide gully.  I don’t know how I did it but I caught a front edge which flipped me forward onto my knees & face then tumbled for about 100m head over hills & spinning in all directions bashing ever single bone & muscle on my useless boarding body.  I managed to find my feet before the fall came to an end & made it down without any serious damage but I am still in pain.  It feels like I been stonewashed in a giant washing machine.

& Finally it comes to insulting the French.  I’ve all ready mentioned the X-games.  They came to Tignes from Wed to Friday last week & in the words of Ron Burgundy in ski terms ‘there kind of a big deal’.   We drove over on Wednesday afternoon so we could watch the final (finishes after the last lift to Val).  It was the Slope Style final 1^st.  The French in there infinite wisdom wouldn’t let spectators up the edges of the course so you had to watch from the very bottom.  But the French being French still weren’t completely satisfied with the view so they built a huge jump directly in front of the spectators so that it was the only thing of the course you could see, but as the course was running slower than usual none of the competitors had enough speed to even get up this let alone do any tricks of it.  The only thing we could see of this were the riders slowly limping over the side & down into the interviewing area.  Ridiculous, only in France.