Alex Thomas's Blog, page 2

Launch party tonight!

Tonight, in Alpine style, the launch party for War & Piste will take place in Megaro Bar & Lounge, Euston Road from 6.30pm. There will be gluhwein, reblochon, a little ski action… and perhaps some lovely freebie stash from our friends at Dare2b!

If your invitation is missing in action, drop us a line – polly@traudlpublishing.co.uk

Looking forward to seeing you there!

The W&P team.

With T minus 5 and counting, do you DARE TO BE creative?

Now that the number of days until the book launch is countable on one hand, it is time to announce some very exciting news. The lovely people over at Dare2b are as giddy about the approach of winter as we are and so to celebrate that and the launch of THE book of the winter, they have given us some lovely lovely stash to give away to you fine people. Fancy a new ski jacket? Time to go-go-gadget-CREATIVITY! Think of a way to finish this sentence:

"There was this one time on a chairlift…"

using the words "dare to be" in any order, context, length of saga you like. Even in poem form (we like a good limerick especially). Then post it here. The finest two efforts will win themselves the goodies.

Don't say we never do nothin' for you…  AT

PS I hear it is snowing in Verbier…

Brave New World Part III

Last time I left you, muscles burning and brain fizzing with excitement, I promised you a refreshing glass of something après-flavoured to round off our little glossary. Well, true to my word, here it is.

APRÈS SKI – whatever about the refined intricacies of the sport of skiing (and to some extent snowboarding… yes, boarders, bring on the wrath), most people can guess pretty quickly what après is all about. It obeys the simple law of the universe that any activity which is the post-activity of another more physically demanding activity consists of one task: get slosherooed.

The ethanol-based lubricants to this activity are many and varied but some deserve special mention:

1. Glühwein (of course) and all its variants.

2. Mutzig, the stuff of utter legend.

3. Good old Jägey, served ice cold or with any/all of its best friends.

4. Risoul's Rum Bar's own-blend rum – seriously wrong but oh so right

5. Birne-schnapps, a right little rocket in a glass.

6. Hot chocolate with rum – a wise incognito choice when your disapproving spouse/partner/boss/parent is somewhere local.

Have I missed any? Let me know. AT is nothing if not keen to undertake further research.

Après-ski venues are many throughout the Alps, but I feel it my duty to point out the places that have achieved (in my humble view) something akin to perfection. High on the list, there is Verbier's legendary Pub Mont Fort, the beckoning arms that welcome many a tired skier at the end of a long and arduous one-piece descent (good times – thanks, PMF). Nearby there is the Farinet where I have had more alcohol spilled on me in one evening than the total amount consumed annually by a small German town. Fact. Honourable mentions also go to Méribel's Rond Point – spot the dents in the ceiling from all that ski-boot crowd-surfing – and Zermatt's Hennu-Stall on the ski home to Winkelmatten, where fans have long flocked to rock out with Alex, Phil and the crew. But while the  contest is ongoing [Editor's note: and AT & the crew are most willing to be wined and wined by any venue vying for top place...don't be shy], I cannot tell a lie… so far winning in the après-ski stakes is the Mooserwirt, St Anton am Arlberg. Why? Because every day at three-thirty, the DJ comes on. The blinds drop. The disco lights are lowered. And, with the push of a button, enormous speakers begin to pump out the opening bars of The Final Countdown. From that moment on, the bar and its outdoor terrace are transformed from a relatively normal lunch spot to a heaving mass of people cheering, roaring and stamping their ski boots to the bizarre blend of 1980s stadium rock songs and cheesy Euro-pop known as après-ski music. From 'Heeeeyyyy, heeeeyyyy baby, oooh, aahh' to Highway to Hell and back to 'Cowboys und Indianer,' (I truly wish the random skulls were the weirdest thing about that last video) après-ski music has a logic only Birne-schnapps and exhaustion can explain.

Phew, I hear you say. At last, something easy and without likelihood of serious injury, hurray! Don't be fooled, après-ski might not involve coming to terms with any new perils such as rapid uncontrolled movement on frozen slopes chock-full of halfwits, or mastering new embarkation skills on high speed forms of chairlift-waits-for-no-man technology, but it is certainly not a hazard-free environment. You absolutely must not wander into this maelstrom of increasingly drunken morons dancing on wet tables in sub-zero temperatures in ski boots without being

a) in excellent spirits and

b) ready to become an identically drunken moron and

c) fully prepared to deal with the post-8pm consequences.

These will range from realising that your skis have been nicked (oh, how frequently… buy a lock, please) to drunken encounters with snow cannons, trees, pylons, amorous ugly people and other immovable obstacles to – worst of all – seriously, as in catastophically, pissing off your chalet host.

CHALET HOST – the person who will be most annoyed of all if your party rock up half an hour after dinner was supposed to be on the table. Sure, it is your holiday. But if, when you get back to the chalet, your be-aproned Mike or Ashley or – if the Chalet Girl stereotype is to be believed – dahling Patronella has a little tear in their eye as they serve up a lukewarm soggy soufflé, you only have yourselves to blame.* Granted, the culinary expertise of many a chalet host is such that dinner being overcooked by up to an hour and a half may not make any discernible difference… but nonetheless, contrary to all cynicism (and most of my personal experience, I must confess) there ARE chalet staff who take real pride in their cooking, cleaning and running some serious-ass customer service. And base-level discourtesy will seriously, seriously disappoint them. So if I were you, I would phone Patronella in advance, please, when the Final Countdown gives you a Total Eclipse of the Heart and you Just. Can't. Bear. To. Leave.

Or be prepared to hide your toothbrush…

* "Why is someone called Patronella serving me dinner?" you ask. "I'm in France/Switzerland/Austria/Italy for heaven's sake." Chances are if you book a ski trip with a major UK tour operator, you are probably going to get involved in a CHALET at some point, whether it is a chalet hotel, a self-catering chalet apartment or a catered chalet equipped with its own personal live-in slave. Originally the word 'chalet' referred to a rustic old wooden hut with a low sloping roof, roaring log fire and all manner of cutesy heart-shaped pillows, cow-bells, antique skis and other Alpine kitsch. In the cold reality of modern tour ops, the term is now applied liberally to any building within forty miles of a ski resort, a single feature of which can be zoomed in on and made to look rustic and appealing by a professional photographer.

Your CHALET HOST is probably one of two things: a wonderful creature who delivers to you vast quantities of delicious fried breakfasts, floaty-light afternoon tea cakes, hearty evening meals and endless quantities of top notch wine, all the while whistling a merry tune and personifying the excellent cleanliness standards of the TOUR OPERATOR. All tour operators, I might add, lie somewhere on the spectrum from the above-indicated perfection to the most colossal fuck-up artistry; the mindless incompetence, wilful indifference and scrooge-like penny pinching misery of which is actually pretty hard to overstate. So to conclude my point about the 'chalet' experience, extrapolate accordingly.

I'd love to stay and chat chalets, tell you stories about chalet food that would curl your hair (or stories about curly hair in chalet food…shudder) but I could never quite do it justice. Rather, I will refer you to the unquestioned expert.

Späters potaters.

AT

Exclusive advance copies now on sale!

Can you keep a secret? Alex and her lovely editor Blue were spotted yesterday making a clandestine book drop at a top secret London location.

Where, you ask? I'll give you a clue…

If you can crack this one, head on down there your exclusive limited edition advance copy, signed by the author. Then tell us what you think. Better yet, get a photo of yourself reading it on the Tube and making all your fellow commuters jealous, upload it to our Facebook page and you never know, some very cool new ski/snowboard kit could be winging its way to you, courtesy of our soon-to-be-announced sponsors…

AT

 

Brave New World Part II

Where were we? Yes, just about to duck behind a barrier and head off-piste… Come, come…

OFF-PISTE means pretty much any other route down the mountain but the groomed paths. Technically speaking this is an off-piste way down, but I wouldn't recommend it for your first run of the day. The main things to know about the world of possibilities that await you Off the Piste is that You. Will. Need. Insurance. [See RUPTURED ACL, below] And you will need a transceiver, shovel and probe. And ideally some idea how to use them. If I hear you saying, 'it's fine, I've got a [popular-brand-name-for-item-better-known-as-'Corpse-Finder'],' I will hunt you down and give you a slap. This is for your own good and also mine, should I happen to be one of the unfortunates who happen to be on the slope when you send down your first slab AVALANCHE (or, 'rapidly cascading tonnes of snow and ice, often set off by utter fuckwits' – see above video).

Avalanches are not the only perils you will encounter. Off-piste, you will find by far the widest range of ways to injure or kill yourself but also by far the most ways to have a blinding good time. Let's start with The PARK. Yes, I'm going to include the park as off-piste. Here you will find lots and lots of KICKERS – large ramps with even larger run-ins where skiers and boarders can launch themselves at great speed into brain-addling knots of limbs and hardware before untying it all at the last second and landing with ease. That's the idea anyway. You'll also spot RAILS here, which are perhaps the clearest possible practical demonstration of natural selection, and the PIPE which is a half-cylinder of rock-hard ice and doom, invented (probably) by a cynical shoulder surgeon having a bad year's business.

Ideally, in the park you should see lots and lots of people wearing HELMETS although most probably you will see them wearing ENORMOUS BOBBLE HATS, crotch-at-knee baggy SALOPETTES and the vacant expression of so many stoners (or people who have landed on their heads quite a number of times. It's actually pretty hard to tell.)

Doesn't sound like it is for you? No problem. Head for the POWDER instead. If you can find any, that is. Powder snow is that elusive dragon we all chase – once you have had a good taste, you're hooked for life. Bad timing, however – climate change and local environmental degradation in many mountain areas appear to be killing the dragon, if snow patterns of the last decade are anything to go by.* Still if you are lucky enough to be in a place that some hefty badass snowclouds have just sat on, you're in for a treat…if you're a snowboarder that is. If you are a skier, you are about to embark on the most intensely frustrating days of your life.

Skiing in powder is all about balance, bounce, leg strength and timing…and ideally a certain love for speed. When it is going well, you're basically flying on a bottomless pillow of air. You own the fucking world – hurtling through a wide, untracked and consequence-free world of euphoria. Nothing can stop you, the feeling must never end.

And then it does, with a crunch and a gutful of snow. At this point, or once you have regained the ability to breathe, you will realise that doing anything in powder snow but flying through its top twelve inches is essentially like swimming in hardening concrete with twenty pound weights attached to both feet while wearing every single tem of clothing you own. Bring along a few spare swear words, you'll need them.

Would it help if I reassure you that it will all be worth it eventually? When you get the hang of it? *Dodges flying shoe.* Seriously!

Better to stick to the shallow stuff? Heck, no. That way MOGULS lie. Not to be confused with the same term referring to the billionaire business magnates who are, confusingly, also rather prevalent in certain ski resorts…not naming any names (Verbier and Courchevel), moguls are hard lumps of icy snow arranging like dozens and dozens of the least fun eggs you have ever encountered. Can eggs be fun? Sure. Are moguls fun? Not if you like your knee joints.

Speaking of knee joints, if (when) things go seriously arse-over-tit and a little professional help is required to get you and the remnants of your Anterior Cruciate Ligament (or ACL as it is referred to lovingly/remembered fondly by skiers the world over) down to the nearest medical facility, dial the phone number on your piste map and like magic, the BLOOD WAGON will appear. The rather horrific concept is that you are strapped in tightly face-up and utterly immobilised in a curious banana-shaped contraption with one hardy and extreme-looking mountain man holding poles at each end and skiing you back down to civilisation. Your only task is to lie there, ignoring the rudely hopeful stares of morbidly curious fellow skiers as you watch the world fly overhead at an alarming rate and wish for all the world that they would stop bouncing you over the fucking moguls.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of the blood wagon, touch wood, but I am told that for all its grimness it is still better than the HELICOPTER. My good friend Poppy and her smashed wrist had the misfortune of being dangled below one of these and flown halfway across the Arlberg (it seemed) for fifteen frozen minutes, unable to look away from the vertigo-inducing panorama to the left or right because there was a rescue-person's crotch literally pressed against each cheek. They didn't even buy her dinner.

The moral of the story? Don't get hurt. For this reason, probably leave COULOIRS for a little while. A steep and narrow off-piste gully, or couloir, is a place where one has to mentally slap oneself in the face and commit to skiing it with short turns and a lot of speed, accepting that there are rock faces on either side and that smashing into them is a strong possibility, though is avoidable provided one does not lose one's cool. A mind game with very physical consequences, in other words. Other perils to avoid in the backcountry include CREVASSES (watch Touching the Void - I am still too residually traumatised by my personal experiences of crevasses to go into detail on this one), TREES (rather self-explanatory, I should think), ROCKS (ditto) and OMINOUS CLIFFS OF DEATH (likewise). Worst and most perilous of all, OTHER PEOPLE'S SKI TRACKS. Chances are you are inadvertently following a nutcase SICK/GNARLY SHREDDER who has just intentionally launched her/his gnarly self off a 60-foot cliff. Don't get me wrong, it probably looked cool. But that is definitely the sort of thing you should think through in advance.

You want to know for super sure what is down there first? What goes up must come down… Go TOURING. Ski touring is walking up a hill with special non-slide-backwards skins on the underside of your skis, whipping them off at the top and skiing down. Sounds bonkers when there are perfectly good lifts? Quite the contrary. Not only is this the most incredible feeling of earning every turn you make on your way down, you get to ski in amazing lift-less places like the astonishingly beautiful Lyngen. Touring is not to be knocked. However this does not apply if you spot someone touring up the middle of a piste. Then you can call them a twat.

Well, that's off-piste for you. I don't know about you but I need a drink after all that. Next time, 'après ski'…

* See what you can do to minimise your environmental impact here.

Brave New World

I was really chuffed recently when M, one of our advance copy reviewers, phoned me up to say how much she enjoyed War & Piste. 'Though I have to confess,' she added, 'I had to google "piste" first. And "salopettes." But now I want to go skiing.'

This got me thinking about the strange little world many of us snow lovers take for granted, particularly the behaviour and lingo that is really unique to this particular environment. Or, put another way, the astounding bubble of illogic that is a ski resort – an isolated little place about one vertical mile up a pointy mountain that even the least-athletically disposed people spend an incredible amount of time, energy and money to get to in order to throw themselves bodily around snow-covered inclines on slidey pieces of wood, metal and plastic for periods of time ranging from one booze-soaked week to a full six months of their lives, all the while fucking up themselves and their environment in ever more imaginative ways.

And so for those well-adjusted folk to whom this state of affairs is not yet second nature, I am going to post here a little glossary, dedicated to the lovely M.

Part I…

SKI RESORT – as above. Small mountain town or village, often rustic and picturesque enough to make grown men weep. Occasionally the charm is hidden far, far below the surface of the aesthetic (yes, Flaine, I am looking at you) but just order the mulled wine, and you'll see it (well, in some places maybe order three). Whether the steaming mug of happiness they serve you is glühwein, vin brulé, vin chaud or gløgg, it'll take the sting out of those defrosting toes, guaranteed. A hug in a cup.

REP – the overly brightly attired, clipboard-wielding employee of the TOUR OPERATOR (from whom you buy your holiday) who meets you at your arrival airport and accompanies you up to the ski resort in a TRANSFER COACH.

[Attenborough-cam: "The rep, like all other season workers (or SEASONAIRES) is a migratory species. In early December, the plumage (company-issue jacket) is at its brightest, because the rep has only recently received his/her winter coat. Note how the eyes are wide with fear on the transfer coach, the hand holding the calculator shakes as he/she attempts to sell you a lift pass and the voice wobbles in clear mutual recognition that the answers to your questions are about 65% bullshit. Mid-way through the season, the rep has become accustomed to his or her environment, has usually found at least one mate in the resort and has probably discarded his/her winter coat in the corners of so many dodgy drinking establishments along the way that it has lost some of its newbie lustre. By late season, with the melt well underway, the rep has just about worked out where the tourist office actually is, has learned perhaps 25 words of the native language and has gained about eight pounds of solid fondue cheese fat (AKA 'pure joy'). At this point, preparing for their annual migration to sea-level, reps are most frequently spotted with groups of other seasonaires sunning themselves in deckchairs at about 1,900 metres' altitude, inexplicably cultivating extreme tan lines across the middle of their cheeks through the excessive use of ski goggles and excessive denial of sun cream. Do not be alarmed if you spot them in the wild: reps are a friendly and incredibly tolerant species for the most part, particularly when approached with food or beverages of the free variety.]

LIFT PASS, the magic ticket your rep sells you on the transfer coach. It makes a little 'bleep' at the lift station and opens the turnstiles to a whole new world of adventure… provided you can make it to the top of the CHAIRLIFT without

a)     falling off,

b)    succumbing to the temptation to lick the metal bars or

c)     forgetting to get off at the top

 

Fortunately the first few times you will have to do this will be with a SKI SCHOOL instructor, who if you are lucky will not only be extremely hot and speak your language, but may even demonstrate an interest in teaching you what to do with the things attached to your feet. Your instructor will also have the most pronounced tan lines across the cheeks that you have ever seen. Don't be afraid to compliment him/her on this achievement.

Should you choose to go it solo, a PISTE MAP should in theory be your best friend, a guide to the various lifts going up and the PISTES (or 'trails') you need to ski down. These maps generally colour code the pistes according to difficulty – blue, red, black and sometimes green. The main thing to remember about these guidelines is that they are total bollocks. If the piste you are standing on happens to coincide geographically with any of the squiggly lines on the map, don't expect it to be even remotely similar to the last one of that colour. Also if you happen to be in the Austrian resort of Lech, they will all be numbered 34a for no apparent reason. Good luck.

Next time, 'off-piste'…

 

Raise a glass of something filthy, please.

Hello War and Pisteurs. Welcome to the wonderfulness that is this website. Come, sit, have a little Stroh 80 with me and let's look at the mountains and the sunshine and the virgin powder. Isn't it wonderful? Look! Snowli the Rabbit is talking! And there's Rachel down there at the bottom of the page in her deckchair – hello, Rachel. What's that? Yes, I agree, everyone should buy the book. But not yet, not until it gets launched on October 13.

So in the meantime, take a look around. Click on the links and stuff. Admire the artwork. Maybe say hello. Better yet, compose me a poem. Best one wins a signed advance copy. Seriously. I just decided that right now but I can do that cos it's my book. Eep! This fact is most exciting. Just like realising that winter is only 13 weeks away. Or like knowing that the snowclouds are building in the east, and that the lifts will soon be starting up and the gluhwein is on the stove, warming up the house with cinnamon and cloves, mingling with the hot wax smell of a freshly-serviced pair of fat, fat skis…

I had other things to say in this post but I keep getting distracted by the awesomeness of this shiny new website. Go and read the extracts. You'll be quizzed on them later.

AT