Ah, Skiing; the sport of kings! Well, not kings so much as middle aged professional couples called Oliver and Imogen who “just thought they’d pop down to Geneva for a mini-break with the kids.” Lacking any pistes ourselves in the UK, if we want to indulge our impulses to hurtle down a mountain wearing a couple of planks of not-wood and wear more clothes than you ever have in your life, you have to travel to Europe, or if you’re even more hoity-toity – America; spending vast amounts of money on planes, hotels, food etc. Skiing is not the sort of thing you can do if you’ve just been laid off, or you owe the mafia a lot of money or you recently became a Scientologist and really, really want to purge your body of Thetans. ‘It’s quite expensive’ I suppose is what I’m trying to say.
I’ve only ever been skiing a couple of times, both times with my school; the latter one being particularly memorable for being the first time I ever bought a beer in a bar as well as the first time I ever had to carry a friend in a drunken stupor home. Since my town is only a couple of hours away from the ski slopes I joined my friend and his daughter on a two day round trip. After arriving, and putting on my ski boots, skis and goggles coloured to look like the spectrum of light you see in a puddle of petrol, I got on the lift and proceeded to half way up the mountain, whereupon I immediately fell over, ripping a hole in the crotch of my brand new trousers.
I should probably inform you, dear reader, that I was not wearing anything underneath my ski trousers bar a single pair of boxer shorts. It was 10am on the first day of a two day trip. I was faced with the prospect of spending the best part of two days at the top of a mountain amidst quite heavy snow with nothing between the elements and those parts of a man’s body he treasures the most, but the thinnest of fabrics. I found that in general, I didn’t feel the cold going down (friction is a wonderful thing), but going up was sometimes tortuous, especially in the snow. If you want a vision of that time, imagine a man shovelling ice cubes into your underpants – forever. The worst thing is, there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you just have to sit and take it like a man, or whatever you are after the frostbite robs you of your manhood, since you can’t cross your legs. As the day wore on, (and the occasional stumbles, missteps and full-blown crashes tallied up,) the hole became bigger and bigger. The only respite was when I walked back inside the hulking, brutalist ski lodge for food and beer; the latter being especially welcome.
After a full day of subjecting my genitals to torture a Guantanamo Bay prison guard would balk at, I headed for the small Japanese style bed a breakfast to soothe my weary body in a hot bath. So, dressed in a slightly ill-fitting yukata that my pitying hostess had loaned me, I joined the middle-aged men for a drink around the small wood burner in the middle of the foyer. These must have been the only middle-aged men at the entire resort, as winter sports in Japan are primarily a young persons’ activity. Also, no-one skis; everyone snowboards. At one point in the evening one of the older men made his excuses and made to go to bed, at which point my friend suggested that he fetch his daughter since I was (at that time) a single man and his daughter was an attractive university student. To my endless surprise, he agreed, rather readily in fact, and he went upstairs to wake up his daughter, for the sole purpose of talking the night away with a complete stranger.
As the night wore on and we continued drinking, huddled around the portable wood burner, it emerged that the daughter (henceforth referred to as Mika) had had a falling-out with her father. In fact, they were on such bad terms that they refused to even sleep in the same room as one another, with a moment’s hesitation my friend offered her a spare futon in our room, to which she happily agreed. I was quite happy, as the two of us got on quite well, so after a bit more drinking, we went to bed; the four of us in one room. As Mika and my friend’s daughter chatted about ghost stories and T.V. programmes, I drifted off to sleep. It was only a few hours later that I awoke to sound of Mika vigorously masturbating in the futon beside me. I suppose on reflection she could have just been moaning in her sleep, but at 2am after a day of strenuous physical activity, the thought didn’t cross my tired mind. Needless to say, I was a little too embarrassed to make much in the way of eye-contact with Mika the next morning, and soon after breakfast we went our separate ways; she to return to Skikoku with her hated father, and I to pack more snow around my testicles.
Later that day as I sat in the outdoor onsen, snow gently falling on my head, I reflected on my experiences on the Japanese ski slopes. If there were two things I’d learnt, it was; to wear earplugs when sleeping in ski lodges and never to buy ski trousers that cost 1500 yen and are two sizes too small.
