If your mitt is airborne get yourself to a lab for insanity testing at once.  Because nobody human really likes it.  It’s the Polyfilla of crumbling conversations. Social armbands for when you’re fast sinking in a sea of strangers.  Muzak for your mouth.

 But I’ll tell you something for free - it’s weird  when you have to do without it.

 I can’t make small talk in French.  I can ask for cake, for someone to move out of the way and explain to the Gendarme why my boyfriend (who is mute in this land of the baguette) has parked his van illegally in front of the ice-rink.  I can answer the phone and politely ask the caller to wait while I fetch someone who can understand them. I can order a meal and explain to any French stranger where the nearest cigarette vendor resides.

 But talk small, I cannot.

 When you can’t pass the time of day with someone, you notice how much of life is filled with silent, odd uncomfortable pauses, and regrettably, how freaked out they cause everyone involved to become. 

 The day the electrician came doesn’t only soundlike a Pinter play, but unfolded like one as well. After I’d offered him coffee I was at a loss and sort-of wandered about silently – I suppose it could have been classed as ‘lurking’ - reconfiguring the way the mugs hung on the tree, fussing with the curtains and smiling at him. But not normal smiling - a sort of mad gurn that you will notice people employ when they’ve got nothing to say.  The only alternative was to go and sit in my tiny bedroom and watch him through the open door. Which would have freaked him out more, I think.

 The French woman who works opposite, came into my café the other day and ordered a coffee. While I was preparing it, she said something small-talky. I gurned in response and stared at the milk carton like a Securicor employee sweating on a third written warning. She said something else. I took a chance, laughed and nodded. She looked surprised, possibly having just asked me if I thought she was looking fat or whether I considered it normal that her husband cross-dresses.

 It was horrible until she left with her espresso. I promptly resolved to learn how to say: ‘Sorry, I can’t hear well – I went a bit nuts with a cotton bud,’ in every language possible.

Since then, she has intermittently forgotten my disability and has wandered in and leant against the counter for a chat before remembering.  Clearly too polite to go ‘ah ha! I forgot – you’re linguistically inept!’ and slink out again, she sort of stood there staring at me, then out of the window, then at her shoes. She smiled and then sighed. I glared at the milk.  She misunderstood and apologetically ordered a coffee.

 However, no small talk brings with it numerous positives. No small talk means you get to the point quickly – as do other people:

‘Can I borrow twenty quid?’

‘No.  I consider you untrustworthy.’

‘I broke your stereo.’

‘Oh shit. You’ll have to pay for it.’

‘Ok.’

It also stops inanities flowing forth:

 ‘Hey, Nice day for it…’

‘Will you please tell me what you want, exactly?’

 When other people are making small talk nearby in a language you don’t understand you can tune it out loads more easily than the English people whose ‘adventures in colonic irrigation therapy’ discussion means you read the same sentence in your book 1,375 times. The wider implications are also extremely encouraging: imagine if you couldn’t small talk at all. Even in your own language. Bars and bus stops would be silent except when people were discussing interesting stuff. PRs would all retire.  Speed dating would be hilarious.

 The only negative about not being able to make chit-chat apart from the uncomfortable silence - which ultimately you get used to -  is that you can’t be off-the-cuff witty. As the woman that runs the gift shop down the way (who smokes like a chimney) found out when she came in the other day.  The conversation went something like this.

Her: [something incomprehensible about  ‘the windows’  Possibly.]

Me: ‘Is your shop good?’ (my grammar means that I sound like Borat to French people )

Her: [Something about the 'neige']

Me: ‘I like snow. I like snow more than I like rain…And I think you like snow more than you like cigarettes!’ (somewhat proud of my use of the comparative tense in a joke.)

 Her: [Adopts miffed face]

Me: ‘…because…you smoke all the time…um.  I don’t speak well.’

 The milk carton promptly collapsed under my death-stare.

Doubtless, he will stare on in stage-horror whist Johnny Foreigner eats/loons about/fornicates with something strange and unmentionable as we gasp into our Ovaltine and check that the front door safety chain is on properly.

And this week, he visits France.

The Brit/Frenchy relationship is a protracted and somewhat rocky one, languid Xenophobia reigning long, perpetuated primarily by the enduring contention that we think the French are lazy and the French think we’re uncultured louts. 

And in many ways, we’re both right. Spend prolonged time in France and you’ll get wound up fit to punch a granny as – again - they close the pharmacy or supermarket fifteen minutes early with a louche shrug and swan off on a three-hour lunch break when you need emergency teabags or pile cream.

Basically, if you’re waiting for something important to be done, there will be a Frenchman who should be there doing it, but is actually somewhere else enjoying a fag instead.

But what we call ‘lazy’, the French see as honest, deserved, good-living.  Share that three-hour luncheon with said Gallic individual, and it’ll be a heart-warming and fabulously sociable experience that any miserable English workaholic would do well to cultivate (albeit to a slightly less than 100% unproductive degree).

Instead of skipping all forms of living outside of the office and consequently being moody, pasty, divorced and thrashing through the  Gaviscon by the tender age of 29, perhaps kicking back and sacking things off things now and again would make that Excel spreadsheet slightly less of a spur to taking a nice nap in the gas oven.

So now, lets investigate the evidence lurking behind this here British ‘lout’ label. Well, despite an unparalleled sense of humour, as dark, dry and dangerous as gunpowder and being gestators of the best popular music in the known universe; due to being being penned up as we generally are for 18 hours a day behind a Mac, only taking eight-minute lunch breaks in the rain, crowding onto buses or languishing in traffic with only (horrors) Chris Moyles for company, we go nuts when off the leash.

Fuelled up on lager and desperate to forget that Mr Brown not only has us by the short and curlies but has probably taxed them as well, we become boorish, anti-social and – well, louty when we’re not restricted by the mores of the workplace.

I have sat outside a nice French bar and watched as an already fairly hydrated Englishman downed a pint and then vomited over himself. More than once. Again, on numerous occasions, the tranquil alpine air has been rent by none-too-dulcet English female tones, screaming ‘faaack off!’ as she wades through slush in knee-high boots, like a renegade office worker from that hideous Boots advertisement, soaked in a scary mixture of snow and Barcardi Breezer .

(And we’re way worse when we are out of our comfort zone. Other nations seem to just get on with being in a foreign country and the limitations presented therewith, but the Brits HATE not knowing where the local supermarket is or how to ask the bus driver if he stops at the tourist office. Fear makes the British prickly. I have had very polite Estonians, Spaniards, Russians and Italians timidly request help when lost in London. In France, the English virtually demand they be taken to their required destination, covering up their fear with this unique brand of shouty aloofness, barking orders at the natives like a deranged Sargent Major.)

So what will Merton contribute to traditional French/Brit relations? My guess is he’ll maintain the merry stalemate: happily clinking local booze receptacles with the Gallic in a way that makes viewers want to sell up and buy a Gite immediately. Before moving on to watch a Frenchman eat a horseburger and casually smoke near the wood pile on a building site so that viewers promptly shelve all Gite plans and give thanks to God that a massive stretch of water separates us from those raving lunatics.

 And so, I ask myself, how is it that I can live here and yet always end up eating meals more depressing than being given a copy of the Daily mail with a parking ticket inside it by a funeral director?

 Because I live like a chuffing student, that’s why. We have already established that the lifestyle parallels are miserably profuse: I sleep in a bunk bed, wear clothes that Pete Docherty would sniffily dismiss as too scruffy, pay for coffee in money I’ve found in the washing machine seal and regularly sport hair that resembles a frantic hedgerow.

To this wretched list I now append my eating habits. As well as freelance journalising, I work in a café, and an airport transfer office. And when I am not doing these things I am waiting for a French person to finish their fag and do something for me or I am up the mountain with a board strapped to my feet pretending that I’m not too old for this shit and careering towards solid objects that weren’t there a minute ago.

This sadly, leaves limited time for the buying and preparation of foodstuffs and therefore generally meals are, at best, imaginative and at worst, unidentifiably brown.

 (On a side note, whoever invented toast should receive some sort of design award. My boyfriend bought me a toaster for my last birthday and after a short, animated exchange as to the questionable romanticism of this gesture, I realised that it was probably the best thing I could ever have been given, ever. Anything is good if served on heated bread and it is ready almost immediately. An associated anecdote: a mutual friend  was recently married.  As a joke, all his school friends decided to buy him a toaster. He recieved fourteen of them. This is my idea of heaven.)

 After a few weeks of bad eating and not going to the supermarket (my record is 17 days), I start getting masochistic and actively see how low I stoop. I see if can survive on dried goods and nasty coffee for days - as if this will win me some sort of endurance award.  Which will of course be bestowed upon me by a smiling and slightly awe-struck Bear Grylls who will coyly ask me for my tips on easing constipation caused by consuming excess rehydrated packet foods.

 Yesterday, I got home ravenous after a session of throwing myself bodily at the piste and really wished I hadn’t been so stoic about vetoing the supermarket.

Yesterday, for my lunch I ended up eating the only thing I could find in the cupboard: popcorn, which I had to pop and which I then coated with dried herbs. 

 It wouldn’t be the worst meal I’ve had (I’m English after all) – I have had a Yorkshire pudding with grated onion in it. I have had a rice cake smeared with Thai curry paste. There is a Pot Noodle floating about somewhere,  but I haven’t quite devolved enough yet to go near it. Yet.

 However, my flatmate came home to find me eating the aforementioned satanic popcorn and immediately put me in the car and dumped me outside the local supermarket.

Inside which I joyfully stocked up on sliced bread, Thai curry paste and more popcorn.

There is nothing sinister about this. It has nothing to do with an acreage of psychological baggage. I am not ‘eccentric’ or in the army. I never suffered an incident as a child that left me with  a crippling carpeting phobia.

No, it just so happens that the room I rent has a bunk bed in it, because that’s the only bed that fits.  This, as opposed to a real, grown up normal, thirty-three year old woman’s bed; whatever that may or may not resemble.  But if urban hearsay is to be believed; tasteful scatter cushions, a variety of modern sex toys, maybe a Twilight novel or two.

Of course, at my age, I should be swanning round a gaff of my own by now, dragging my significant other to Ikea every first Saturday of the month to deeply ponder shower curtains and sideboards. A, from whom I rent my room and it’s associated bunk bed, not only owns this flat in the Alps, but also owns a house. In Peterborough, granted, but a real-life house nonetheless. 

My baby sister has a house of her own and it has a SPARE room.  The only thing spare in my room is, well,  the bottom bunk.

I woke up in my bunk this morning (I take the top one, if you’re interested) and thought, as I lay there staring at the wardrobe with one stiff door: ‘Thank God I’m not - as mother would have it -  “courting”.’

Can you imagine? You bring a gentleman caller back to your flat, offer him a tipple, perhaps put on something inoffensively seductive.  And by this I mean Ray La Montagne or something by Iron and Wine, not in the sense of disappearing into the bedroom and coming back out in a negligee and fluffy mules with a Rothmans smouldering gently in a 1920’s cigarette holder. 

And as the music plays, imagine leading your gentleman caller into the bedroom and coyly whispering in his ear – ‘right then, top or bottom? Oh, and mind your shin on the ladder there.’

If were going to get technical about things, there’s not even enough room to do the deed on the floor, unless you want to end up disengaging your partner from the waste-paper bin or rushing him off to casualty so he can be cut out of the angle-poise lamp flex.  Truth is, the only kind of romantic act you can execute in my room is a stand-up hug.  In fact, in order to get any other one person in my room - naked or otherwise -  it’s spatially essential to hug them.

Surprisingly and fortunately enough, I have a boyfriend whom as luck would have it, I wooed when I had a bed meant for a grown-up. 

Ok, so I was also sharing a room with two other people, the wiring of which was so sketchy everything fused if you tried to boil the kettle with the lights on. But the gods smiled upon our union and, faulty wiring notwithstanding, our amour became established before I ended up in a bed meant for eight year-old siblings.

He thinks it’s amusing that I live in a room that would give an obsessive potholer claustrophobia but is a little miffed that ’sleeping over’ means nothing more promising than kipping on the sofa or taking twenty five minutes to inflate the Argos guest mattress for the living room floor.

As it happens, he sleeps in a bunk-bed as well. This isn’t a freaky ‘us’ thing by the way. Most seasonnaire rental places opt for bunks because they are used to catering to the accommodation needs of the traditional seasonnaire, ie: seventeen year olds who are so busy going out  roistering themselves silly on Jagermeister that they  end up passing out on the doorstep, thus rendering beds an irrelevance.

And besides, he sleeps in a  bunk and he’s thirty five.

My first thought (because when life consists of wading through slush with a ton of shopping or being frozen inside your car, things tend towards the prosaic) was: ‘Christ alive! She’ll break her neck!’

Probably in the voice of a Northern Dad.

My second thought however was…’ohh! High heels…*sigh*’ in a reminiscent-y, sad voice, pining for the days when I didn’t dress like a fourteen-year old boy with a sweatshirt material obsession

When I first quit London, I did a small internal joy-dance that I’d no longer have to care about how I looked when I left the house.  This joy subsequently ran away with me and I now regularly go out resembling a small, shambolic pile of un-ironed clothes.

I also wear hoodies. And I am thirty three years old.

Now, perchance you just frowned in distaste, maybe even yelled a horrified obscenity. Reader, you would be justified.  A thirty-something woman in a hoodie is an abomination. There’s something innately disturbing about it that makes the inside of your face itch; like seeing your science teacher in jeans, your mum in a mini skirt or Chris Hollins in plunge-front, be-spangled Lycra. 

A thirty-something be-hoodied woman screams ‘ASBO!’  It positively yells out ‘rehab!’  Alas, it also says: ‘living in a ski resort along with other thirty-something women in hoodies, like some sort of twisted, soft-clothes-favouring commune.’

I binned Glam back in 2004. I now use eyeliner when someone wants to leave a phone message and I can’t find a pen. I use my Walford tights to hold my hair back when I am dragging nasty hair-ropes out of the shower plug hole. I no longer have my cherished denim mini (it was frivolously donated to my friend Ed, a strapping six-footer who was going to a local party dressed as a prostitute). 

And as for my high heels…well, let’s just say the spare room at my parents’ house looks like an explosion in a Russell and Bromley sale outlet.

Any attempts to be glamorous in snowsville are swiftly jettisoned the first time you think it’d be a nice idea to leave the house in a lovely silk vest and promptly feel your nipples turn into wing-nuts in minus fifteen temperatures. And anyway, ironically, turning up to a bar out here in a boob-tube or sequined mini-dress earns you exactly the same kind of ‘WTF?!’ looks that you would receive wandering into a chic soho cocktail bar wearing, well…a hoodie.

Make-up is also swiftly eliminated as wearing ski-goggles, combined with time in the sun on the slopes earns anyone out here for an extended stint a sort of odd, lower-face suntan which makes you look as if you’ve constantly got five o’clock shadow. When teamed with any sort of cosmetic product it makes even the most female of females resemble a prop forward in drag.

It is nice not to endure self-inflicted fashion pressure, but sometimes me and the hooded ladies will gather together and fantasise about inappropriate footwear, pointless handbags and things not made of Gore-Tex fabric (which although spectacularly useful are about as feminine as a bucket made of wood.)

I often wonder what Victoria Beckham – well-publicised skiing fan - wears when she’s hidden in her chalet, away from prying paps. And whether lurking inside that vast Birkin is a pair of stinking ski boots (they all stink. Even Victoria Beckham’s. Like an unholy marriage of dead ferret and Camembert), thermal granny pants and an eyeliner pencil. In case she has to take down a telephone number at the last minute.

Oh! I like her better already.

When the language being spoken around you isn’t your first, it’s a million times easier to tune out. Which is marvellous, if you’re sharing air space with one of those people whose conversation ‘tends to carry’ as my mum would euphemistically put it. By which of course, we mean:  ‘has a voice like an oil drum being kicked around a skip.’

However, even more obstructive to my desire for quiet contemplation is my innate nosiness. Which means I simply cannot tune out when somebody nearby is talking about something fabulously scandalous or from whom I catch a snippet of something which, out of context, is utterly intriguing. 

So, since living here I’ve been much more able to be alone with my own uninterrupted thoughts, but on the flip-side I’ve missed finding out what the woman in the nice coat drinking cappuccinos did next when she ‘came home and found David in my Marks and Spencer camisole. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.’

So it was a pleasant surprise when Christmas and New Year week came along and suddenly the white noise became discernible, entertaining soundbites again as town filled up with British tourists.  Many of whom didn’t think they could be understood.

Girl 1 to Girl 2: ‘It’s dad’s dream to retire and open a tea shop in the country.’

Girl 2: ‘Really? How cute! ‘

Girl 1: ‘Imagine that, eh? And to think that at the moment he’s a prison governor…’

Woman (regarding chickens on a spit outside a local shop) to her companion: ‘I don’t want to sound narrow-minded, but the French are such a blood-thirsty race aren’t they?

Father to son: ‘She wouldn’t know what to do with it if it had a big red cross painted on it. D’you know what I’m saying?’

Woman, holding out an i-Phone to her partner: ‘How do I make a phone call on this Christing thing?’

Young boy: ‘I hate the French. And the Belgians’.

His mum: ‘I know. The Belgians can’t drive at all.’

Girl in her teens to her mate: ‘The French wear really bad clothes. Their shoes are like shoes disabled people wear.’

It is also highly interesting to note the reactions of the people listening to the madness coming out of the person telling whatever story you happen to be eavesdropping on. May I present the below conversation, overheard - honest to God - in a local bar by a friend of mine:

Man 1: ‘So, then I found out she was sleeping with her next-door neighbour.’

[Gasps of surprise]

Man 1 (getting into it): ‘So I thought I’d send a couple of the boys round. To beat him up, you know. Give him a good scare.’

[Nervous laughter. Oh. He isn't joking.]

Man 1 (oblivious to the fact that he is unnerving everyone): ‘I told them to go round to the house next door, tie him to a chair and give him a good slap, you know?’

[People nod, but of course they don’t know.  Because clearly only mad people get other people beaten up]

Man 1 ( laughing): And can you believe it? They went to the wrong bloody neighbour! They beat up the guy that lived on the other side of my girlfriend! Ha ha ha! Hilarious!’

[Coats are surreptitiously collected as the tale's irony fails to amuse all non-mentalist bystanders]

 It can also work the other way. I have been caught out on more than one occasion, boldly holding-forth, believing  that no one around me can understand what I am saying about their irritating child or lack of spacial awareness when indeed they very much can and very much find my opinions objectionable. Last week, me and my housemate, A had just been told we would have to wait an hour and a half in the garage reception whilst a Frenchman finished his cigarette and went for a long lunch (probably) before being available to put a new fan belt on our car. As a result, this made A late for an appointment with her gynaecologist.

There was an old woman sharing our table reading a French book about dogs so A didn’t think twice about telling me she now, inconveniently, ‘had to call the hospital to reschedule getting my fanny poked at’ and effing and blinding heartily about the delay.

Which is why I nearly wet myself when the woman stood up five minutes later and said in the Queen’s English: ‘I do hope you get everything sorted out by the end of the day girls.’

Before wandering off to collect her Corsa.

They become a monster once they get poles in their hands. The monster takes one of two hideous forms: the Dangerous Numpty and the Rude Drunken Twat.

The Dangerous Numpty loses all sense of personal space on arrival in resort, as if an invisible threshold is crossed and they can’t do anything without getting in everyone else’s way. At some point, an ambulance may need to get involved.

The DN will thrash blindly down the street, skis slung horizontally across their bodies, gut-barging you off the pavement and into the path of oncoming buses. They will forget that they are holding very long, pointy poles and will take your eye out/dink a nearby car/skewer a dog at the bus queue whilst absent-mindedly checking their watch.

Carrying ski boots in a bag on their shoulder they will merrily smash you in the face with it as they dismount from their Hyundai Santa Fe, Land Rover Discovery or whatever Chelsea Tractor they happen to be driving whilst bellowing at their nasty children, screaming at being forced to wear a bright red all-in-one for eight days.

DN damage is also caused by:

(1) Suddenly grabbing you by the jacket lapels because they have lost their footing on the ice and reached out to save themselves. Elderly ladies have been Half-Nelsoned to the floor in front of my very eyes.

(2) Wandering in the road regardless of traffic whilst pointing at something above their head.

(3) Abandoning (rather than parking) their hire car across the pavement – so you cannot pass without turning sideways. Gets interesting when another Dangerous Numpty tries to pass. Carrying their skis horizontally.

(4) Skiing. At any time.

But perhaps the most abhorrent incarnation of the Brit on a skiing holiday though, is the Rude Drunken Twat – aka: male, thirty-something ‘young professional’ who thinks he can snowboard because he once spent two hours getting pissed in the bar of the Milton Keynes SnowDome.

These individuals roam the resort in packs of about six or eight, ruddy-faced, shouting about how they spent the day ‘riding some sick powder!’ i.e. they got tanked up on brandy and pointed all fifteen stone of themselves down a piste, narrowly avoiding killing two German kids and a Dutch snow-shoeing party howling ‘YEEEAAAHHH BUDDDY!’

Tales of their mountainous bravado rarely match up with reality, ie lots of falling over on expensive kit they can’t ride and sweating while their friends laugh at them. They also start using the word ‘dude’ a lot and bandying about phrases like ’sessioning the park’. If you ask them what the hell they are talking about they will insist that they have always spoken this way.

They also like to buy and wear the ‘maddest’ woolly hat they can find. Because, as we know, nothing says ‘I’m mad me!!!!!!!!!’ like a ‘mad’ woolly hat.

Both types will also demand the very soul of the chalet workers that are charged with looking after them. These poor bastards are to be found wandering the local supermarket aisles for hours on end, seeking Yorkshire pudding mix and muttering to themselves looking haunted, wondering if that badly-paid, 20-hour day job they left behind is still available.

The best so far? Probably the customer who came into the cafe where I work last week. ‘Oh thank God!’ she rejoiced as I greeted her in her mother tongue. ‘No- one round here speaks bloody English!’

I felt it somewhat churlish to point out that it might have something to do with this being France. So instead, simply opted for head-butting the counter.

Despite the absence of the white stuff, town is still robustly keeping it’s end up by evoking Christmas spirit in numerous other ways.  Ways you would expect from a picturesque Alpine settlement: twinkling lights on every lamp post.  An outdoor ice-skating rink. Horse-drawn sleigh rides through town.

Led Zeppelin tribute bands.

I had the pleasure of watching Von Zepp the other night at Morzine’s Winter season opening shindig. The excitement kicked off early, when I decided to negotiate a short cut across an (unlit) frozen field. Me, in pixie boots, clutching a bike lamp, minus fourteen degrees, dodging the frozen dog poos.

Living the dream.

I have to say, Von Zepp were bloody brilliant. In fact, I would stick my neck out and name them the best gig Morzine has ever offered up. Which, alas, isn’t quite the accolade it could be, considering they are up against an ancient local bloke repeatedly playing ‘Y Viva Espana’ in next door’s garden on an accordion for THREE FUCKING HOURS last August, and a leather-faced French rocker in his mid-fifties performing Hawkwind covers at the Morzine annual Harley Davidson convention. 

Incidentally, this latter spectacle is one of the more eccentric occurences in the local calendar (after the pig fete in July).  Every June, town looks like a gigantic Meatloaf appreciation event. Stalls pop up selling tasseled waistcoats, belt buckles the size of hub caps bearing relief mouldings of Chief Sitting-Bull and leather-clad, hairy Dutch bikers (and their male partners) haggle over the price of vast, offensive wall-hangings of James Dean.

But anyway, back to the Zepp. Despite being able to smell the rock and roll from where I was standing at the bar (what is it with rockers and man-made fibres? Don’t they know you have to wash after every wear?) they were absolutely brilliant.

There were a few eighteen year-olds slouching about wearing stupid hats clutching pints of Stella looking a little confused but then Stairway to Heaven was played and all looks of constipation eased.

All the favourites got their airing, including the full 8 minutes 28 seconds of Kashmir which they totally pulled off without everyone using the opportunity to nip to the loo or go outside to reply to text messages.  Rock and Roll showcased a ninety minute drum solo, courtesy of Airport micro-celebrity Jeremy Spake’s French twin. During which time the bassist (who resembled a Victorian magician) and lead guitarist (Goldie Hawn) walked to the bar, ordered a drink, chugged it and slouched back. How terribly rock and roll.

The lead singer (Jacques Black in tight denim and fright-wig) even had the R. Plant-screech down to a tee, but undermined his rocker status by swigging water throughout his performance. I had rather hoped to see him sucking at a bottle of Jack Daniels, or even better - Pernod.

At the end I wandered over and congratulated them. ‘Would England like us do you think, yes?’ asked Jeremy Spake from behind his drums as Goldie Hawn started winding up cables.  I affirmed that they very much would.  ‘It is our dream to play in England,’ he grinned. 

Well, they’ve certainly got a much better chance than the bloody ‘Y Viva Espana’ accordion player.

Well, I would have been queuing if the French hadn’t abolished it in the Fifties and replaced it with ‘competitive huddling.’

To clarify: instead of the traditional one-behind-the-other business, the idea is that every new individual desirous of service, casually wanders up to the ‘queue’ and joins it somewhere at the side, until the ‘huddle’ becomes a sizable cluster. At which point, a cashier becomes available and whoever spots them first makes a sprint for the service hatch.

Leaving behind all the English people to stand there politely, fuming gently to each other about it until closing time.

In an earlier blog, I dimly recall promising that I would not slag at the French like typically intolerant Brits do when there are no teenagers around to criticise. I am now executing a shameless u-turn, obviously having forgotten the hell of the ‘competitive huddle’ when I wrote that drivel. 

However, if there happen to be any French citizens reading this… would you please also learn to drive properly as well.

Anyway, enough of this fun /cliched xenophobia/ enjoyable reminiscing.  And as I was plucking up the courage to bum-rush a seventy-year-old woman with a dog in a shopping bag clutching a postal order, I happened to spot a young English girl collecting a large cardboard box marked ‘URGENT’.

Now, I didn’t have to wander over and stick my nose into that box to know that (a) that would have been weird and perhaps even frightening for her and (b) that this girl was a brand new seasonnaire who had just received her first ‘Aid Package.’

Fact: even if you have chosen to live in the gastronomic epicentre of Europe, your parents will always assume that you will be unable to find anything suitable to eat.  Earthquake, homelessness, difficulties with language be damned: the most distressing fate a family-member can imagine for you is being without baked beans or PG Tips; Rickets and Scurvy a constant threat in this new and terrifying world of Michelin-starred restaurants, cafes, patisseries and local farmers’ markets.

Within a week of you having placed foot upon far-off soil  (i.e. Belgium) your parents they will frantically fill up two trolleys at Tesco and ship you an Aid Package that could easily feed a small village in Equatorial Guinea for some months.

It will without doubt contain the following: 1,369 Tea Bags (Tetley or PG), Marmite, Baked Beans, OXO cubes, mincemeat, sausages, tuna, tinned soup and a copy of the Daily Mail. Basically all the things you rejoiced over never having to touch again when you left England.

Depending on how hysterical your folks can get, you may also receive a life jacket, shot-gun cartridges, a reflective blanket, a glow-in-the-dark whistle and strong rope.

When I moved here in 2005, I remember my mum calling up and asking whether I needed ‘deodorant sent over’.

Me: ‘Mum, France is in the EU.’ 

Mum: ‘But you never know!’ she responded apprehensively, probably imagining that I was calling her from a satellite phone next to a Malaria hospital, as opposed to a mobile phone from a nice flat  next to a supermarket.

Me: ‘Ok, send me the deodorant. I’m off to watch TV.’

Mum: ‘You have that there then, do you?’

I haven’t told her they really, honestly eat horse yet. I’m saving that for when I need to be sent an emergency helicopter back to Blighty.

Before anyone feels the need to point out that I CHOSE TO LIVE IN A SKI RESORT I admit, hands fully aloft, that yes, indeed I did. But I also like moaning about it, in which case please feel free to read somebody else’s much cheerier blog about celebrities. Like my friend Lisa Mark’s excellent page, for example.

So, it has snowed. And in the Alps this doesn’t mean a lovely, romantic dusting along the windowsills.  This is fully-hammering- it-A-Grade-dumping-without-warning-from-no-snow-to-two-feet-in-48-hours type-snowing.  What was once your car is now a crystalline mound of impenetrable whiteness and walking too noisily near a roof/ tree/precipitous overhang could mean you’re suddenly wearing about a ton of the stuff as a new, yet very disagreeable hat.

This morning, I was awoken at seven a.m. as the snow plough (which, if you didn’t know, creates the sort of noise an industrial loom would in the bathroom of a terrace house) merrily cleared snow for twenty minutes from the car-park in front of my apartment block. Then the woman downstairs, obviously feeling left out, started scraping her front step with a massive plastic manual-plough; which, if you didn’t know, sounds like… well, a massive plastic thing being dragged over knobbly concrete.

Seven a.m. is arguably an acceptable get-up time, but I had slept rather badly thanks to a powerful curry consumed in front of the first two highly disturbing episodes of True Blood.

In many ways, I do love it when it’s beautiful and cold and impossible to get anywhere. Town gets busy with people wrapped up, merrily supping vin chaud and the pavements are lethal but at least you have something wonderful to ski on which makes everybody brilliantly excitable.

You’ll also see brand spanking new seasonnaires everywhere, raring to work their first ski season catering and cleaning for holidayers.  You can spot them a mile off:  nineteen-year-old blond girls in skinny jeans, Ugg boots and ear-muffs giggling and furtively smoking having escaped the parents. Baggy young men in ridiculous hats who can’t put a pair of trousers on properly between them. Late-twenty-somethings that have fled a 24/7 London city job for the mountains, looking dazedly delighted at the incredible realisation that their biggest stress from now on will be whether they missed a bit when they vacuumed the bedrooms. 

 One thing is for sure though: lots of snow + internet =  erm…no internet. Chalet bookings, transfer driver communiques, freelancers (of whom there are numerous out here) need it daily and it can all get very, ‘exciting’ when it packs up in everyone’s apartment/office simultaneously. We all end up steamily wedged in the same Internet cafe, thrashing the Broadband to kingdom come.

I’ll never forget the first time mine went down. I was writing a particularly interesting sex feature for Cosmopolitan and thus had to conduct my interview with a Californian penis expert via Skype in the middle of a crowded Internet cafe. Fortunately, my interviewee didn’t ask why I was almost whispering throughout. But alas, did insist I repeat ‘Why are the testicles so sensitive there?’ in a louder, clearer voice that proceeded to echo round the place like an escapee guff during a funeral service.

One can definitely do with a vin chaud after that sort of carry-on.