SKI BORES TAKING THE PISTE!

FOR those who have now fully recovered from the seemingly endless festive revelries, may Smith on Saturday wish you all a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year.  

But for those of you about to jet off on a winter skiing holiday, may I adopt the age-old theatrical tradition and hope that you all “break a leg”!  

I’ve never understood the appeal of skiing (a case of whoosh, then walk a mile). It’s a so-called sport which seems to attract the kind of people answerphones hang up on. 

Every January hundreds of posers in turquoise lycra suits and Chewbacca boots take to the slopes of Verbier and San Moritz. When they’re not ON the piste, they’re taking it (if you get my snowdrift).

  

After months practising on dry runs in woolly hats and mufflers, it’s downhill all the way as they clumsily clop around, fall on top of each other and skittle into chairlift queues while trying to keep up with an eight-year-old. 

Those who refuse to wear protective ski goggles go blind, while those who forget to put on the sunblock lose at least two layers of skin. 

Then for the “apres-ski,” they amuse each other doing mock German accents and sinking gallons of Schnapps. 

 

The chalets are full of colour co-ordinated Carolines and Henrys who say: “OK, yah, sweetie!” to nobody in particular. Then in the morning they wake up with sunstroke and spend the day in bed. 

But worst of all is when they hobble home in signed plaster casts and bore the pants off everybody with endless pictures of their tedious drunken antics. And they call this fun?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

SALE TIME MADNESS

IT BEATS me why shops still call them January Sales when most of them now begin on Boxing Day. 

And if you ask me, anyone who camps out all night on the pavement outside Harrods to buy a reduced mink stole (down to a bargain £2,500) must be several diamonds short of a tiara!

_______________________________________________________________________________

A RESOLUTION REVOLUTION?

THEY say that a New Year resolution is something which goes in one year and out the other. 

Smith on Saturday hereby vows to be much more tolerant of fools in 1993 and less abusive to the world at large. 

And if anybody believes that, they're a bigger bunch of buffoons than I thought they were!

______________________________________________________________________________

(This column was originally published in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph on Saturday, 2 January, 1993)