Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

http://blog.listingslab.com/index.php?readOld=true

I made a good start to learning French when I arrived in Les Houches a few months ago, but I’ve fallen into the usual trap and let it slide a little. It’s just too easy to speak English all the time. I went climbing outdoors yesterday and there were 2 French guys in our group. I felt rude to be making them speak in English, but apart from some initial pleasantries I’m just not fluent enough to converse.

So I’m going to make it a priority. First I’m going to actually study an hour a day. I’ve got some grammar books to work through and some tapes, and I’ll start reading a French newspaper.

And secondly I’m going to move. My lease on the Les Houches flat finishes in a couple of months and I’m looking for a new place to live. Les Houches is lovely, but it’s still a holiday resort really. I’m going to move down into the valley. I’ll be able to become more French, and also it will be much cheaper and I’ll get much more space for my money. I’ve been exploring possible places in the car and I’ve got my eye on le Mont de Servoz. Maybe I’ve been seduced by the fact that I visited it on a beautiful sunny day, but look at the view. That’s Mont Blanc at the back of the picture.

Has anyone else noticed that in the morning news, we’re now being told what will happen that day? David Cameron will apparantly be proposing that The energy tax on business should be replaced with a levy focused on cutting use of carbon fuels in a speech he’s due to make later today. (more)

How can it be news until he’s actually done it? Once it is news, why would he bother doing it at all? Perhaps if you break the news before it actually happens, you can stop it happening if there’s bad public opinion to the news that hasn’t happened yet. The mind boggles.

If I’m going to be told what’s going to happen, then I’d rather it was something useful, like who’s going to win the world cup. Then I can stick a monkey on it.

I scared the crap out of myself this morning. I was skiing on the Grande Montets, just me & my ipod. I took the cable car to the very top – 3300m. The usual, pisted way down was really busy and looked a little icy and rubbish, so I decided to come down the front face. You can see this face all the way up in the cable car and it looks hard. It’s steep, there are chunks of glacier lying about as big as houses, there are crevasses and there are avalanches.

So I was following the tracks down. I’d seen plenty of people on it that morning and I knew that if I stuck to the areas which had been skied, it was safe enough. All of a sudden I found myself on a slope that had no tracks. I stopped dead and looked around to work out the reason there were no tracks.

Everything that I have learned about avalanche (which is admittedly not very much) screamed out to me. The shape of the slope, the wind loading, the type of snow, the weather; everything said …… avalanche. I had no choice though, so I skied down it as smoothly as possible and didn’t fall. Nothing happened. No avalanche and the most perfect 20 seconds skiing in the most amazing terrain ever with fresh tracks in beautiful snow. I see now why people get seduced into taking the risk. That 20 seconds was amazing. And frightening.