And after all this, won’t you give me a smile?
Spring has sprung in the Alps. The sky is blue, the sun is warm and the scantily dressed lifties are all sunbathing while they keep half an eye on errant snowboarders who might cause a stooshie by falling off lifts and nearly killing their wives (why yes, my book of remembrance *is* still open at that page). Everybody is happy. Well, apart from Nick, obviously – he hasn’t been happy in 59 years and sees no reason to start now.
It’s our penultimate day here – on Saturday we start the two day drive home to the Motherland, via Reims to buy champagne, obvs. Ticking off the Lasts has started – I did my last run this morning. We skied Mont Chéry to death today – tomorrow is the turn of Chavannes. I might even do some packing more than five minutes before I’m reluctantly shoved into the car.
And so, once again, it ends – and what have we done? We’ll gloss over the mere 67.53 kms of running – I should be doing that every week right now, so some hard discipline will be in place from Monday morning. Sigh. The cross training hasn’t been too bad, with 25 days and 394kms of skiing at the time of writing this (and more to come tomorrow). One of us recovered from Covid. The other of us caught and then recovered from Covid. I had norovirus. It was like Emergency Ward 10 around here for a while, with far too many bodily fluids flying around with gay abandon.
There have been endings and wonderful beginnings. There have been dreams and conversations and plans and friends and (not enough) cheese.
As well as the obvious things I miss about being here, writing this blog is also on that list. When I was a child, I blithely assumed that I’d earn my living from writing, without ever stopping to consider how I might do this. So that worked out well, then. Perhaps spewing the contents of my head across the interwebs is a middle aged manifestation of a childhood dream, who knows? But to those of you who have been kind enough over the past year to tell me you like it and to ask for more, I’m very grateful. To the haters, you now get a break – my quill is going back in its box until July.
There’s a certain joy in going home, too. To see people and to do things. To put plans into place that I didn’t have even an inkling of when I arrived here 5 weeks ago. To see Joe and Ash for the first time since 9th January – that’ll be a noisy car when we pick them up in a couple of weeks. Sadly, to a house without Tilly and her traditional 24 hours of bellowing her opinions up the stairs at me….but to El Floofo, who will pretend he can’t remember who we are. Again.
Les Gets you have, as always, been a joy. Part of my heart always stays here and the rest is counting the days until we come back.
