I was feeling the winter yesterday. As I sat at my desk rubbing my hands together to keep out the cold I realised suddenly that I was feeling a bit crap. Obviously that’s because I’ve been working far too much. I needed to unplug and go skiing, so that’s what I did this morning. It wasn’t exactly a bluebird powder day. Very low cloud in town, cold and I know that because it hasn’t snowed for a while, everything’s pretty bulletproof and icy.

But the closer I got to Les Houches, the brighter it got and suddenly I could see the ridge above the Prarion lift & I knew that the Houches was a good choice.

It wasn’t about skiing anything steep and gnarly today – just booting it about on the piste, getting the blood moving, meeting up with Sarah once she was finished in the chalet and having a good, long lunch in one of the lovely hidden restaurants that Les Houches is famous for.

Having sketched about on the ice an high speed today, I suddenly decided on the way back to the office it was time to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I bought a helmet. Giro’s Bad Lieutenant. It looks like a German World War 2 storm-trooper’s helmet.

So obviously I’ve been walking round my appartment all afternoon wearing my new kit, nutting stuff. Yep. I’m bad.

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So I’ve been living in the office this winter, and one thing it lacks is a proper kitchen. I have a microwave & my camping gas stove, plus a small frying pan, couple of plates and a few bits of cutlery. It’s a bit like camping, I love it! I’m getting quite good at it now. I’ve got a larder out in the garden, where I’ve got loads of vegetables in tinfoil container prepped and ready to make stir fries & curries & the like.

Last night was a madras curry. I’ve got a good, strong patak’s paste from the English section of the supermarket & fried off some onions/peppers, added paste, fried it up a bit more, then transferred it into the camping cooking pot with some water and tomatoes to simmer for half an hour or so. Rice is fairly straightforward in a tupperware tub in the microwave, and voila – a pretty good vegetable curry for me tea. And for lunch today as it goes. I bet it’ll be even better the second time around.

Maybe I’ll have a dinner party.

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You know when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have no choice but to haul yourself out of bed? Well, you could hit snooze a couple of times, but really you just have to get on with things. Get up, get dressed and make your way to your job and start the day. It’s your routine. Every day you have to get there roughly on time because if you don’t you’ll be fired sooner or later. In return though, you don’t need to worry too much about money. Oh sure you’ll feel like you don’t have enough of it from time to time, we all do.. but in return for being disciplined about your routine and turning up at your job every day you get paid every month, you know how much you’ll be paid and you don’t need to worry.

Working as a freelancer from home like I’m doing, you don’t have that. When my alarm goes off, I COULD stay in bed. If I get bored during the day I can just wander off and no one will care. On the other hand, no one is obliged to pay me and every month there are still bills to pay. Work is still work. It’s when you have to do something that if you were really free to choose, you wouldn’t do it. You must do it to get paid. That needs discipline and routine.

Imposing discipline and routine on my life is difficult but important. I have a pathological fear of routine and I try to break it every chance I get. I wrongly think routine will depress me, but the truth is that the lack of it is even more dangerous. Discipline I struggle with too. I still have remnants of that dumb teenage attitude ‘No one tells me what to do’. Including myself it seems.

I’m getting better at it. Slowly. And although it’s a difficult part of one’s personality to address, discipline and routine are definitely useful things to be good at.

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Much as I’ve enjoyed skiing so much this season, it’s time to get back to work. I’ve been in front of the computer all day and I’m feeling exhausted. It’s made me realise how little time I’ve been spending in front of the screen recently, and I’m going to need to get used to that again. I’m going to spend the next few days working and not ski till next week.

Back in the summer when business was looking a bit sketchy, I spent quite a lot of time doing business development. I spoke to a lot of companies all over the world about various projects. As tends to happen at these times, something finally came up and I went over to work in the UK for 3 months. But also as tends to happen, some of new business leads I was working on have started to work out. I’ve got a new client with some challenging, long term work lined up so it’s time to get my head down and get that job off to a flying start.

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Global Economic slowdown? Good! Why do we we want everything to be so fast anyway? Everyone’s running round as mad as lorries as it is! Slowing everything down a bit can only help. Housing market crash, pension time bombs, recession, credit crunch, blah blah blah. Forget about it. It’s self-perpetuating media hyped bullshit anyway. Focus on what’s important. What are you having for breakfast this morning? Will you enjoy it?

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Another great day up on the mountain today. It’s getting silly now – fresh tracks all over Flegere all morning and then I was skiing with Mark and his intermediate course taking photos and shooting some video. Here’s the photoset

I was skiing on my new skis (yes, that’s ANOTHER new pair of skis. I now own a full quiver of 4 pairs of skis!). These were a present from my mate. Now that he’s not sponsored by Dynastar, he decided to give me his old Pro Models. prO, man! These skis are what the top free-riders use. They’re huge. Fat as hell, and taller than me. You have to give them some respect, but they’re fantastic in the powder and bomber on the piste.

So yeh, another great day, but I have the feeling I’m going to need to reduce the time I spend skiing in the coming weeks. I’ve suddenly got a lot of work on, and need to make sure I stay on top of it. One more morning tomorrow with the ladies who rip, though perhaps…….

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A new series of Modern Toss coming soon to your tellybox. Here’s a clip….

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I broke my skis today. Well, actually I just ripped the binding off, so I’m sure they can be fixed. I was skiing in Le Tour, off piste in the mist. I thought ‘ooh, I’d better cut out of this section before I hit the gully’ BANG! I hit the vertical wall of he gully and came flying out of the lip minus my skis, did a forward somersault and landed on my bum on the piste. Much to the surprise of the punter skiing by. Whilst I was fairly happy not to have hurt myself even a little bit, I was a bit less happy to find I’d ripped one of the back bindings clean off my ski. It meant skiing down on 1 ski. Luckily my touring skis were in the van, so I went and swapped them and did a few more runs.

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Sunday was an amazing day’s skiing, as I breathlessly wrote the other day, but it’s amazing how quickly things turn upside down. I went up the Grands Montets again yesterday afternoon. Feeling a little jaded, and the weather had closed in. It was cold, cloudy and difficult to see the bumps, of which there were many. Perfect conditions to tweak a knee, then, which is exactly what I did. A silly little fall during a slow traverse ended up with my left ski stuck in the snow and the rest of me twisted around far more than was comfortable I was stuck with my knee facing the wrong way knowing that any wrong move would cause a serious injury. Luckily my friend Katy was on it and made it up to me very quickly to release my binding for me.

So no major harm done, but a few days resting the knee before the next potentially epic day on Thursday. It’s going to be snowing off and on until then, with blue skies predicted. I’m going up with All Mountain Performance & a video camera to get some prO footage for our DVD project.

Also I have a new addition to the office this week. Sisu the dog. A friend of mine has to go back to the UK for a few days and I’m looking after her dog. She’s a nice doggy on the whole, but a little skittish. A 3 year old from the rescue centre. She can keep me company while I rest my knee and get some work done on the computer over the next couple of days.

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There’s a word skiers use to describe days like today. epic. It’s when the weather, the snow and timing conspires to make it the most perfect day on the mountain. Some epic days turn up when you’re not expecting it, and some you can tell are in the post and all you have to do is put yourself in it’s way in good time.

So when it snowed all day yesterday and a perfect, crisp, winter’s blue-sky January day was forecast for today we all knew it was here. And although it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese – it IS the early bird who gets the worm.

So I was on the second bin up to Lognon. A quick Bochard because I can and I can get fresh tracks all the way down back to the top lift and then straight round and down the front face. Took a while to learn how to ski it. Wind-affected, compacted powder but deep anduntracked.

Then a stroke of luck. Some friends had a spare reservation for another top lift straight away. Straight up again and round to the front face, into the Italian bowl. A quick run on theHerse and then I met up with Fred and skied Lavancher with the snowboard crew. More powder because we’re following snowboarding lines rather than skier’s and that means you can float over the rocks and take a much more direct, untracked route. Slight accident. A shoulder dislocation. Not me, thank god, but nasty nonetheless. Bit of lunch and then a quick Hearse so that Fred could drop the wind lip and a Hotel Face back to thePiere Ric & back home for beers and medals.

Epic. Check out the grins. Ear to ear.

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