One foot in La Grave
By ALASTAIR INSTONE

I remember the first few drinks, after that only vague snippets. Spilling a beer. Half a conversation. Dancing. Falling over.

I wake early and cannot sleep. I deserve the hangover. Visibility this holiday in La Grave is poor; I can barely see the spindrifts arcing off the ridge. A flash from the previous night pops into my head, the response of an old bum when I asked if he's skiing more powder than this time last winter. "Comparisons," he told me, "are odious."

Slumped alone in the gondola, trying to swallow the taste of beer, I ponder my season. My eighth day on skis—also my last. I watch the wind pick up snow and throttle it against the derelict shepherd's hut. I rode this lift every day last winter; now it feels as alien as spending every day in the musty, dark library would have felt then.

In my mind I'm still in Edinburgh, trapped between endless, towering rows of books, as lost as an entry in the Dewey database. The library, where my only anchors to sanity were daydreams of bottomless, never-ending, 35-degree powder slopes and the surreptitious reading of ski magazines behind the biochemistry section. Yet here in the mountains, things have never felt so wrong. Skiing has lost its pleasure; I look forward to beer more than the snow.

The lift clatters and jerks to a halt, rousing me. Outside the station is an eerie calm, a warm, close silence. I pause, unsure of what to do. I hear the bum's words in my head again: "Comparisons are odious." Then his next phrase: "I just ski."

He just skis. I step into my bindings, repeating the words, just ski... just ski... Twenty turns down, approaching the trees, I'm picking up speed; still the words roll around my head. The trees flash past the periphery of my vision, my skis turn effortlessly, playing with gravity on the hard snow. I don't know when the mantra stopped, but by the time I reach the bottom it's gone, along with my hangover. I want another run. And another.

All day I just ski. I cease making comparisons to last winter. That evening when I turn down beer, friends ask why I look so happy. I grin and tell them, "I just skied."

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