Skiing

Watching Winter Olympics morning coverage, mum got to talking about skiing. She learned in Norway with a Norwegian instructor who was a ski jumper. Learned when she was 13 or 14 - “of course to be really good you have to start when you’re about four, about when you start to walk. He had a son who was so high (about three feet) and he’d wait till we were down and then come down and go between us, his dad yelling at him, giggling away! We got used to it by the end of the week and just stopped to let him. I preferred the Norwegian way, going on trails on hills and in the woods, to the Swiss downhill, though I’m sure that’s partially how I learned. The Swiss had great cakes though, we’d go to the patisserie in the next village and get boxes of them...”

My own skiing experience was at the Hillend track here, at about 11, and stopped pretty quickly - before it got to the point of there being actual snow - which I kind of regret but I never really got to the point of staying upright.