Oh Good. It’s Snowing.

Oh, if I’m not careful I am going to be labelled a miserable bint. ‘Too late’ you say? Right. Pointless holding back now then, eh?

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.