I did my fair share of alpine skiing in my younger years, especially when I was living in France. My first honeymoon, as I have had the luxury of having two (so far), was in Chamonix, where I took pretty intensive lessons, which is always a very good idea for a beginner.

This set a sound basis for my forthcoming years of skiing, enabling me to improve relatively quickly. In later years when I was living in Nice, it was only a couple of hours drive to the closest resorts, which made it even easier.

So I progressed nicely from green to blue to red and was also starting slowly to tackle the odd black slope once in a while. No mean feat, especially in France where the level of their pistes is known to be rather difficult.

So all in all I was rather pleased with myself and gaining in confidence as time went by. All until one day a few of my friends asked me if I wanted to join them for a skiing weekend in Meribel/Val Thorens. And why the hell not, I figured. A few days with the lads should be fun for a change.

They asked me briefly how well I skied and I told them quite confidently that I was pretty good, which was not an exaggeration by most standards. However, as the saying aptly goes, everything in life is relative… as I was soon enough going to find out, the hard way.

We all made our way there, a couple of us from Nice, one from Marseille and some from the Lyon area and it came as no surprise that we spent that first evening partying hard until the very early hours of the morning. I distinctly remember that only a couple of hours later, when we had to meet for breakfast, my tongue and lips were still bright red from the gallons of vin chaud I had consumed during much of the night, and the only bit of rinsing they had received was from the dozen or so fiery eau de vie, which knocked me out flat.

Breakfast was painful, very painful. But not half as painful as putting on the tons of gear, trudging laboriously to the ski lifts and making our way up to the top of the frigging world. This happens to be quite literally the world’s largest ski resort with over 600 kilometers of trails, served by 170 lifts and joining Courchevel, Meribel, Val Thorens and four other stations together into a mega resort like no other, called Les Trois Vaallees.

So we took lift after lift and we went higher and higher, until we were close to the mountain tops themselves. All of this physical exertion, the bitter cold and the relatively thin oxygen, sent both my head and my stomach spinning, as I regurgitated disgusting burning residues of red wine and white spirits. What I desperately needed was a nice comfortable bed and another eight to ten hours sleep rather than attempting to beat some world skiing record, that morning.

But what was done was done and I strongly hoped that the exercise and the fresh air would eventually clear up my throbbing hangover. What I found a bit strange however, was that as we arrived at the top of the world, at the end of the final and highest ski lift, my mates didn’t head down the harsh black slope that started its torturous way down from there, but they headed in the opposite direction, down a steep and very dangerous narrow ledge, beneath which was quite literally a near vertical cliff, falling precipitously several hundreds of metres below.

As I shuffled carefully along behind them, trying to hug the mountainside on the opposite side of the narrow ledge, to my intense and terrifying horror, all my friends suddenly started popping over the edge one by one and shooting down the vertical face like bullets! No, no, no, no, NO! I thought! This isn’t skiing, this is absolute madness. It was exactly what you would watch on TV in some extreme sports type of programme. And they were not even trying to slalom carefully down from side to side, they quite simply couched forward on their skis and headed straight down forward, dodging rocky outcrops and totally vertical falls, as they raced down at lightening speed.

Within seconds they were all the bottom of the immense drop and making their way along some gentler slopes, before disappearing again over another edge, much further down. It was more then obvious that these guys were totally ignoring the marked trails and just doing it their way totally hors piste and searching for near vertical drops and other madness, just for thrills. A couple beckoned me to follow them down, as they too then vanished over a much lower ledge.

The rule we had set was that we would always wait for each other at the bottom of the slopes, until we all regrouped, before moving on to new ones. With this in mind, with the great difficulty to make my way up the steep narrow path to the top of the lift, and even to manage to turn around in such a tight spot, and also because I would lose these guys for the rest of the day – this being well before the time of mobile phones, it really seemed that I had no other choice than to follow them down their chosen cliffs.

Fear, dread and terror are words which do not even begin to describe my feelings as I went over that edge. I however kept my skis parallel to the slope, leaning sideways towards the mountain, desperately trying not to tumble all the way down, and began the extremely tough and tortuous descent, as slowly and and carefully as I could.

Because of the immense gradient, I had to literally spring up into the air and twirl myself around in the opposite direction, every time I had to turn, otherwise I would instantly shoot down to the bottom, the way by long-gone buddies had done, but in my case not at all out of choice.

It was truly exhausting, painstaking and very slow work, as I laboriously wound my way gradually down the first face. By then already, my legs were shaking uncontrollably from total fatigue. But after the small comfortable slope at the bottom, there was another cliff, and then another and yet another… and no trails anywhere in sight, all the way down.

I was so totally spent by the end of it that I literally didn’t have the strength to stand any more and I descended the last few slopes sliding down on my backside. I was simply unable to stand up.

When I slid down the final few metres, onto a large flat area at the bottom of the slopes, where hundreds of skiers were commuting in one direction or another, I was the embodiment of shame and humiliation. Everyone looked at me with scorn and disgust, as they steered well clear of my broken body, in case anyone around would wrongly assume that they were with me.

I was cold, wet, shivering and dangerously exhausted. My lovely helpful and compassionate friends were nowhere in sight. As I lay there, panting in the melting, filthy sludge of a thousand skis, one of my mates gingerly comes forward from amongst the crowd, desperately hoping that nobody recognises him.

He looked down at me with a look of utter disgust and said “And you told us that you could ski! Pfff” and walked away, coldly informing me that they would see me at the hotel that evening.

I struggled hard to stand up and to make my way to the bus which would take me back to the hotel. Every step was immensely painful and I must have tripped and fell on my face at least three times, as all the skiing fashionistas made huge detours around my failing body.

I spent the rest of the day in bed trying to recover and finally summoned enough courage to go down to the bar and face my friends. As they say, attack is the best form of defence, so I thought I would play it in this direction. I gave them all a big piece of my mind and called them every French expletive and obscenity I knew, which I can assure you was exceedingly prolific.

So they all had a chuckle and a laugh and when I was finally done, they then explained how they were all ski instructors except for one, the one who had won a gold medal as the best skier in Savoie, and he was considered as the weakest one of them all.

NOW YOU TELL ME!