Golf in the snow?

With a trip to Limone, a pretty ski resort village just across the Italian border for a few days due to start on Tuesday with all the attendant risks of eating and drinking that is likely to entail, and having had three very unrestrained days, plus a creeping insidious hangover, I decided to have a quiet day yesterday despite it being a Sunday, which as the Reverend Jeff knows is a special day normally reserved exclusively for fun and entertainment.

Early morning I was guilty of yet more of my impersonations of a lumberjack and paradoxically I felt better after filling the car up with wood, well enough briefly to contemplate a bloody mary, but that passed and I settled down in a sober mood to write this column for well over the 600th time.

Fellow trainee lumberjacks Tony “I invented the internet” Coombs, the Wingco and “Slash And Burn” Thornton Allan accompanied us but the Wingco was astounded when he was asked to become involved in our group activities. I could see him looking around helplessly for his batman, or perhaps a fag to take care of any hard work that may have been required before adopting a superior manner (a task that comes very naturally to him) and deciding on a non active observer role. I think I heard him mumble something about shrapnel moving about in cold weather.

Golf had been on the cards with the Landlubbers and although I had decided not to play I popped up to the golf course for a look where I took this picture. It seems fairly clear to me that they were not playing. How would you spot a white ball in this lot?.

Looking down the 17th hole at the Grande Bastide

I had expected more of a backlash from my public schoolboy friends to the allusion I made in this column yesterday. The fact that some items of clothing belonging to one being discovered in the bedroom of the other on Saturday night when both were staying with us (in separate bedrooms according to them) has raised suspicions. Perhaps they have not yet looked at yesterday’s episode of this incisive look into the daily lives of the idle rich in Valbonne?   I am sure that when they do they may be slightly agitated, perhaps even uncomfortable? If I see them today it will be interesting to see which of then has trouble sitting down.

Talking of public schoolboys with knowledge of the kind of activities that can impede sitting comfortably, Mr Clipbeard together with his lovely spouse Ashley will be jetting in from the UK this evening, ready to join us on that trip to Limone. They will be our guests overnight before we set off tomorrow. We shall be joined for this annual jaunt (we did it last year for the first time do that makes it “annual”, right?) by “Slash and Burn” and his beautiful powerful Amazonian wife Lisa.

We shall be staying at Aracador, a chalet restaurant at Limone reached only on skis or by snow mobile when the ski lifts are not operating. It is a wonderful place and very popular but with just 4 guest rooms but what is impressive is that they were prepared to have us back after last year. Bad behaviour by, it has to be pointed out, the female contingent last year when the unattended bar was mysteriously liberated of several bottles of Sambooka late one night when dinner should really have finished long ago (a fact reflected by the chef/landlord dozing off in a chair whilst waiting for us all to go upstairs). The poor chap gave up at 1am and with no security on the bar, temptation proved too much for that one or more of the three girls at the scene of which one may have been that nice lady decorator.

The trip will not all be fun frivolity, theft and skiing, there is a serious scientific side to the trip as we are conducting a survey of where to get the best Bombardino (a local coffee accompanied by a local greenish liqueur and topped with lashings of whipped cream) on the slopes. I meanwhile will be on constant look out for potential customers for Currencies Direct.