Talk about piste off
It’s galling when your kids can ski faster than you after only a week’s instruction
ABOUT ten years ago when I was pregnant and living in New Delhi, the Australian High Commission threw a charity ‘street party’ with a prize draw of a chance to sample an array of imported delicacies that you would never find in Khan Market. I waddled along to show my face but wimped out half way through, dragging my reluctant husband away from an international drinking experience from which my condition forbade me. We awoke next morning to the insistent drrring of the telephone; a colleague impatient to tell us that we had won the top prize with our ticket number… a Club Med holiday in Malaysia.
As it turned out, by the time we were able to take them up on it, we had a fully air-breathing infant no less than seven months old. Chief among wonderful memories are white palm-fringed beaches and our smiling baby clutching a piece of real French baguette in her fat fist. Club Med were not silly to have donated that prize because as a direct result, we went straight to them when booking our first family skiing holiday this year. That, and the fact that the French Ambassador recommended it, which more or less settled the matter.
Our only regret is that we returned yesterday. I’d go back tomorrow. Our travel agent nearly fainted when she heard what we were proposing to spend on a week in Chamonix but her enthusiasm for the deal grew as she fully took in what was included in the price. As well as full board, ski-lift passes, all the adult group instruction, swimming pool, fitness classes, saunas etc, at no extra cost, our children were taken off our hands every day and transformed from debutantes (beginners) into flocons (snowflakes) by the end of the week. There is considerable value for money in a holiday from which they return having learnt a skill they didn’t possess on arrival.
It’s occasionally disconcerting coming across them at stages of the learning process – rubbing your eyes in amazement at the sight of the second-born taking a button lift alone without falling off… or the sweet sight of the older one leading one of those perfect little serpents of crash-helmeted apprentice skiers down their first blue slope. Later in the week comes the more galling experience of trying to keep up with them as they ski eleven times faster than you down the same piste.
You arrive to free Champagne and chocolates, seamlessly followed a succession of Rabelaisian banquets with a stupefying display of excellent quality fresh food skillfully created before your eyes. And all the wine you can drink, which is a system that appeals to me. It is all because French people won’t accept less. Of course if you are eleven years old, and English, and have no taste at all, you can eat a pile of chips and ketchup and wash it down with coke. And this time it was our second child who was permanently glued to a piece of baguette.
But the great thing is the ethos of the place. It genuinely feels like a club and not a hotel. The staff call themselves Gentils Organisateurs (GOs) and we are the Gentils Membres (GMs) – they don’t like the word client. It’s all socially engineered so that you sit down to eat at largeish tables together and mix with other skiers and – a nice touch – the GOs who join us in the same restaurant. Every day the skiers return to new surprises all unrolled with much humour and high spirits: mulled wine, music, snow-cannon effects, silly skiing demonstrations and once even a pen with baby goats and sheep to amuse the children.
If you can conquer the soporific effects of a day skiing to stay awake for the nightly theatre cabarets, they may not be the Folies Bergeres but the standard is professional and as you watch you gradually realise “Hey! wasn’t that solo singer on reception this morning? Isn’t that the shop assistant? Look, surely that dancer is Benoit from the bar and that willowy woman in the front row of the chorus has got to be our cleaning lady’ Yes! work for Club Med and see the world. But don’t apply unless you can sing and dance; and it helps if your Michael Jackson dance impersonation is close to perfect.
All very French, of course, but at the same time very cosmopolitan, and amidst the babel sounds of fraternising gentils membres one lunch time my husband suddenly remarked that he hadn’t heard any Greek. Blow me if ten minutes later among the ski boot cupboards we hadn’t run into two nice young Cypriot women with huge snowboards who had been brought up on Club Med. “Katapliktiko! – we wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else,” they said. Nor would we, now. Although it would be even better if we could win next year’s holiday at a street party…
