Carving out creativity

(Spoiler warning: this blog entry contains cheese.)

I skied twenty consecutive seasons, and then suddenly the passion went dead.

Maybe it was some bad luck with poor snow conditions, ill-fitting ski boots (my last girlfriend called me Shrek Feet, enough said), the ridiculous cost of a ski holiday (yes white powder is an expensive Class A drug), or a host of other reasons. But I missed 3 consecutive seasons on the bounce. I fell out of love with hurtling down mountains. 

Until….approaching Christmas, with nothing other than London based r’n’r planned for New Year, a friend and I suddenly imagineered a week in the Alps. And did it.

The only place with a spare bed left in the whole Tarentaise Valley was La Plagne, so that’s where we headed.

The early signs didn’t augur well. The road we had to negotiate up to the resort had more hairpins than Elsie Tanner, and the village was a selection of boxy sixties buildings, among which were the first tower blocks I’ve ever seen in the mountains. Chocolate Box charm was thin on the ground.

Thankfully, the snow situation was quite the opposite. The whole place was carpeted in the white stuff.

Our hotel, the Araucaria, was new and meant well with vaguely Art Deco inspired décor and ski lockers that worked on your electronic room key (why don’t all ski hotels have these?) It was fabulously located at the bottom of the slalom slope so you could have a late afternoon aperitif on your bedroom balcony and catch all the races. Basically a nice place, apart from the hyperactive Maitre’D who in the charm stakes made Basil Fawlty look like Basil Brush.

I’ve always found skiing a totally creative experience and source of almost divine inspiration, a time when the mountains rule and you think expansive thoughts. (Laurence, cut the spiritual crap, Ed.)

But the first couple of days, I just couldn’t get it right. My boots were adjusted all wrong, I bruised the top of my foot so each turn was agony, and my short short curvy carving skis felt all wrong to a man who’d skied his formative years on 203cm planks with nary a curve between them.

The sun was great, the snow was new, but I wondered if I’d ever get back ‘that feeling’.

And then: like it always does with anything truly addictive, the magic cut in. We skied across the Paradiski region to Les Arcs, and suddenly we were on kind red runs snaking through the trees, with hardly a soul on them, and then my knees began to flex, and that sensation of feeling the skis through the balls of your feet and effortlessly unweighting from one to the other began to cut in (yes I know that’s Old School technique, but hey ho!).

My friend and I weave in and out of each other’s tracks, and I see a smile even bigger than my own. And briefly, oh so briefly, I feel like I’m flying and master of all I survey.

And it may sound cheesy, corny, call it what you will – and it maybe it’s the Vin Chaud talking - but I see next year and all the creative projects, for me and for work, and we can make them fly too. Sometimes creativity comes easily, sometimes you have to carve it out.