By no stretch of the imagination could my approach to skiing be described as daring. I have never been drawn to the moguls or yearned for the half pipe or terrain park. My conception of a good downhill experience – laughable no doubt to the crazed freestylers and radical snowboarders – encompasses no more than the maintenance of an undisturbed connection between ski and snow. I am the “corduroy” type: a devotee of the groomed trail’s seductively parallel grooves. I am, in other words, an on-piste man through and through.
Not that I am without ambition. I am also stubbornly autodidactic when it comes to technique: I took only one, now half-forgotten, lesson as a beginner. But my solitary attempts at self-improvement over the years have been concentrated, not on the rougher ground, but on the steep, or at least the steeper, slopes, provided of course that the grooming machines have manicured those blue squares and black diamonds almost to the condition of a shirt front.
