Everest summiteer Grania Willis goes back to school - ski school - with a revolutionary instructor who promises to take the effort out of skiing
It must have been at least half a decade since I'd done any skiing, and I was aware that my technique had rusted considerably. Yes, I'd been on a good few mountains in the interim, and some pretty high ones at that, but it felt like an eternity since I'd last kicked into a pair of ski bindings and whooshed off down the white stuff. So when the opportunity arose to do a clinic with Top Ski in the French resort of Val d'Isère, I leapt at the chance.
But it wasn't just a jolly on the piste. The trip would also afford me the opportunity of meeting a man who must have one of the most covetable jobs in the world. As well as being ski correspondent of The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, Peter Hardy - together with his wife Felice - produces the skiers' and boarders' bible, The Great Skiing and Snowboarding Guide.
Published annually, the guide emanates from a new stable for 2006, Cadogan Guides. The Hardys travel to around 40 resorts per season to compile the guide, which offers in-depth and impartial reviews of the best snow destinations in 75 countries. The Gideons have been leaving their bibles in the drawers of bedside tables in hotels since forever. Perhaps the publishers of the Great Skiing and Snowboarding Guide should consider doing the same in ski chalets?
But Peter Hardy hasn't always had such a cushy number. As a former foreign correspondent, he has had more than his fair share of brushes with death. Arrested, along with his photographer, as a spy when he was sent to Uganda to interview Idi Amin, he bribed his captors en route to his own execution with a Bic lighter and three flints.
But probably his most life-altering moment came in the mountains, when he and a group of friends were skiing off-piste at the ghoulishly named French resort of La Grave. Peter and one of his companions both fell while tackling a narrow, icy couloir. The companion died, but Hardy, despite falling 600 vertical feet and landing in a neighbouring couloir, miraculously survived.
Hardy's left leg was shattered, broken in 17 places. Worse than that, he had severed the femoral artery in his thigh and was bleeding to death. A French nurse who had seen his rag-doll body being flung out of the couloir, used her scarf to make a tourniquet, but skied off as the mountain rescue helicopter arrived to airlift him to hospital. He never found out her name and, despite numerous attempts, never managed to thank her.
But Hardy has another skiing friend to whom he owes a huge debt of gratitude. After a series of operations that left one leg 10cms shorter than the other, he must have thought his skiing days were over. Not so. Hardy's friend and former ski racer Pat Zimmer told him that when - not if - he skied again, he would teach him to ski in an entirely new way.
That "new way" is the theory behind Top Ski, the company Zimmer formed 30 years ago as a direct rival to the Ecole Ski de France (ESF). The resulting fall-out between Zimmer and the ESF went to the High Court, but the ESF's monopoly was broken at the finish and Top Ski was born.
Zimmer didn't start his life on skis, as so many top racers do. Judo was his chosen sport, and it was only at the age 13 that he put on a pair of skis and discovered that "it was instantly easier to ski than walk". His main goal in life now is to pass on that knowledge to his pupils, either through personal tuition or with one of his 20-strong Top Ski team. The method is the same, even if the tutor changes. Take the effort out of skiing and make it both pleasurable and easy.
"The most extreme skiing you'll do is gliding and allowing the skis to do the work," Zimmer tells us on the first morning in Val d'Isère. He likens us to a car that isn't running too smoothly. "I'm going to take your engine apart," he says, and proceeds to do exactly that.
He takes us pretty much back to basics, but there's none of the "bend ze knees" commands of the old school. Zimmer tells us to imagine we're skiing barefoot, so we can feel the snow conditions underfoot. "Relax" and "breathe" are favourite mantras. Along with a belief that skiing is both spiritual and sensual. And the Zimmer approach makes all the difference. When he tells me to "ski like a skier, not like a punter", suddenly, magically, I am doing so.
It's a major breakthrough and, just to prove the point, the Top Ski instructors all carry videos so they can catch all the action on camera. Pupils are, mortifyingly, invited to watch themselves in glorious technicolour at the Top Ski offices après ski each evening. A glass or several of white wine from Zimmer's native Alsace helps to soften the blow.
"Swivelle" is another much-used Zimmerism. What he's referring to is the swivel of the feet and ankles to initiate the turn. But it was a bit more confusing when he kept telling us: "Stay on your axe." It took a moment to realise he meant our axis, but the misunderstanding is of the gauzy, flimsy kind, certainly not anything that could be termed a language barrier.
On the second day we worked on the disassociation of the bottom half of our bodies. This really was rebuilding the engine. "Don't get all existential on me," Zimmer pleaded. "Don't think, just feel." So we stopped thinking and we felt the snow under our imagined bare feet and, miraculously, we were skiing. The punters had vanished from the slopes.
You don't need to be an already accomplished skier to tackle the Top Ski clinics. Confidence on red runs is all that's required. And a reasonable level of fitness. After that, it's all about your ability to assimilate the Zimmer message and translate it into an astonishing improvement - on the piste, down the mogul fields and in powder.
After a hard day on the piste, what could be better than a massage back at our luxurious chalet in VIP's wonderfully welcoming Aspen Lodge. Pamper Off Piste provided the soothing hands to unknot our overworked muscles before we repaired to the Top Ski offices for a video or two avec du vin blanc. And then it was back to the chalet where El, a Cambridge geography graduate, was preparing a splendid feast. Is there a place closer to paradise than this?
Further information about Top Ski check out the website, www.topskival.com. Information on Val d'Isère can be accessed on www.valdisere.com. Pamper Off Piste - www.pamperoffpiste.com.