Avid Blog readers (I flatter myself) may recall that a few weeks ago, wandering down the beach in Grenada, I talked my way into the St Georges University match racing event.....and nearly won.

My first time in a dinghy in perhaps thirty years yet the old skills just kicked into place like a well oiled machine.

Compare that to skiing, because that's what we were doing last week. (The ultimate double whammy. SKI'ing aka "Spending Kids Inheritance" while actually skiing!)

Anyway, while I can drop into a dinghy thirty years on and give a half decent performance it seems with skiing I'm doomed to learning again every year. It's also a whole performance. First, you have to undo a million years of evolution. To achieve the levels of balance we humans take for granted the human foot has 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments.

So what do we do? Force them into rigid plastic boots specially equipped with little levers to squeeze the blood out and render your recently fully functioning balance mechanism fully rigid. Then they expect you to walk. It's like being in an episode of The Wrong Trousers.

An hour later, after a couple of runs, at the other end of your leg, the thigh muscles are screaming in agony. This is no sport for people who live their lives in an environment where the longest possible walk is 45 feet and four feet is the maximum elevation ever gained at one time.

Switzerland and in particular, Wengen has been a winter sports resort for Europe's rich and famous for over a 100 years. And just our luck, we chose the 100 year old hotel. Badly lit with creaking floors and tiny single beds we rattled around like peas in a pod as only 3 of the 68 rooms were occupied. Going to the loo in the middle of the night sounded like a 3 year old playing his christmas xylophone.

Anne dropped her earring one night. As I crawled around on my hands and knees I said "put the light on". "It is on" she said.

In the evenings we would walk the deserted streets past the 5* hotels where Pandora, Lulu and Yorkie (probably spelt Jorki) whom we met on the train, enjoyed their cocktails and fondue in front of log fires while we peered in through the windows like Louis Winthorpe lll from Trading Places.

Nonetheless, we had a BRILLIANT time and by the end of the week when it snowed 12" of powder, the old magic was back.