A skiing we will go...

Yesterday, we went skiing.

Kind of.

I went skiing, Sanae and Cian stayed inside the lodge eating their body weight in chocolate and cake, occasionally venturing outside to check the weather before scurrying back inside and declaring they need more chocolate before they can hit the slopes. Admittedly the weather wasn't all that conducive to skiing (or pretty much anything else beyond a grim, desperate need to stay warm and not die in a frozen Hemming-way, in a snow drift, alone. After being emasculated in the First World War).

Anyway, we rocked on up to Karurusu, the local ski resort. Actually 'resort' is too grand a term. More like 'the local ski slopes on the side of a windswept hill'. Normally, I would only venture out 'on the piste' as it were in conditions like those below.

However, yesterday was not such a day. Rather it was more akin to below but with more frozen bodies littering the slopes.

I am not an avid skier, or rather not any more. I used to be. Back when I was living in Shibetsu (or to be more precise, 'Back in the day, when I was the Man'), I used to jump in my little Toyota Cynos on a Friday evening and drive impossible distances in impossibler conditions to Makari, home of 'Smooth' Ben G. . We would then ski the feck out of Niseko all day Saturday and like the powder heroes we were, spend all Saturday night drinking our body weight in Asahi Super Dry whilst fending off the determined advances of the local female high schoolers. Or rather I fended them off. Ben G. took a more of a "Oh no, not again. Please, please be gentle with me. It's my first time. Again"; and then would be led off into the night to prove to the girls' volleyball team that he had not, in fact, been emasculated in the first world war.

On the Sunday, replete with the mother of all hangovers, I would jump back in my Cynos and power the 10 hours or so across the width of Hokkaido (with only a brief refueling stop at McDonalds in Tomakomai) to my forgotten part of the world. Where I would resume being 'The Man', albeit one with a very sore Hemmingway like head.