Max Atkinson's Blog

Half a century of skiing

If you've been wondering why I haven't been blogging since the election got under way, it's because I've had much more important things to do - on a family skiing holiday in the French Alps.

When my son kindly (or pointedly?) bought me a private ski lesson for my birthday present, the instructor asked me how long I'd been skiing. The answer, somewhat embarrassingly, was that it was more than fifty years ago - when things were very different compared with today.

1. Kit

In 1957, the boots were made of leather and the skis were made of wood.

To select 'correctly' sized skis, you had to reach into the air as high as you could before being allocated a pair that were a full arm's length longer than your height (RIGHT: Me with leather boots and long wooden skis, December, 1957).

Since then, the design of boots and skis have changed dramatically - and for the better. The boots are now much more comfortable and the shorter spoon-shaped skis make the whole business far easier than it used to be - and raise the question of whether the absurdly long skis of the past were a cunning ploy by the ski schools to make sure that you paid for classes for much longer than necessary.

2. Lifts

Apart from the kit, the best thing that's happened (except in smaller resorts) is the replacement of button and T-bar lifts that pull you uphill, wearing you out long before you ever got anywhere near to the top, with comfortable high speed chair lifts (and various high tech gondolas and cable cars).

I'd forgotten just how tiring and stressful it is being pulled up-hill on your skis before skiing down-hill until a recent visit to a small French resort - where, on a single day, I had to endure the torment of thirteen button-lifts.

A few days ago, I went up at least as many chair-lifts but was able to relax and enjoy the views on the way up to each of the summits - from where you felt suitably rested and ready for the descent.

However, although I'm all in favour of the modern chair lift, my favourite lift of all is the historic cog railway from Wengen to Grindlewald via Kleine Sheidegg, which originally inspired the foundation of the Downhill Only Club and the concept of lift-assisted skiing - without which it would never have become the mass pastime that it is today.

3. From winter sports to dedicated skiing

Fifty years ago, you went on 'winter sports' holidays and skiing was just one of the things you did among others, like skating, tobogganing and curling. Today, people just take to the slopes on skis or snowboards and doing anything else tends to be viewed as 'wasted time' - which seems a pity, as I enjoyed last week's expedition on a sledge pulled by Huskies as much as a toboggan ride we did a few years ago from Kleine Scheidegg to Wengen.

4. Resorts

Fifty years ago, most of the ski resorts were farming villages or health resorts, mainly in Switzerland and Austria, that had just begun to develop skiing as welcome boost to their local economies.

Today, if skiing is your main aim, the post 1960s French purpose-built resorts, with their hundreds of kilometres of pistes, interlinked by high tech lift systems have transformed things beyond belief. Each one of the Thee Valleys (Courcheval, Meribel and Val Thorens/Les Menuires), so the anoraks tell me, is a bigger ski area than the biggest area at any resort in North America.

But, if you're after Alpine character and old world charm, forget about the architectural monstrosities and indoor camping in tower blocks bequeathed by the French revolution of the 1960s-70s, and head for a traditional Austrian or Swiss village (providing you can put up with more limited ski areas and the daily torment of drag lifts).

5. Snowboards

Fifty years ago, these were still a thing of the future. And, if their reduced representation on the slopes last week is anything to go by, I suspect that, fifty years from now, they'll be a thing of the past.

Is James Naughtie the most long-winded interviewer in broadcasting history?

At one point during one of this morning's interviews on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I began wondering whether James Naughtie would ever get to the end of the question he was asking.

It reminded me of how often the garrulous Mr Naughtie has had this effect on me, and got me wondering whether I'm alone in wondering why the BBC lets one of their top interviewers ask questions that are often longer (and less coherent) than the answers he elicits from his interviewees.

So I found it quite reassuring to discover from a quick Google search that you don't have to look far to find comments about his long-winded style of questioning. Nor did it take long to come across some fine exhibits (HERE), and the following specimens are reproduced in ascending order of length.

I haven't timed how quickly Mr Naughtie speaks. But if we assume that it's somewhere around the average conversational speed of 170-180 words per minute, it would have taken him more than a minute to get to the end of the longest of these (184 words).

Is this another example, I wonder, of the BBC's apparent preference for allocating more time to its own staff than to the people we'd rather be listening to - that I blogged about a few days ago (HERE)?

Q: What's very interesting here is that we're very quickly back into the arguments, which are quite familiar about the reasons for war. And let me suggest to you, Secretary of State, that the reason these arguments are still quite fresh in people's minds a few years on is because they realize this has been a campaign attended by mistakes. Of course, there were people thought it was a bad idea completely. But even those who said, well, maybe this is the way to deal with Saddam. Look at John Sawer's, who's political director now of the Foreign Commonwealth Office, his assessment in May 2003 just after the invasion about what the American forces were doing there: no leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. Now that was the Pentagon in Iraq. That was a mistake (140 words).

Q: But you see, the problem that we've got is that we know about Guantanamo and we know that Mr. Gonzales who is now the Attorney General has said in one famous remark in a previous incarnation with the White House that he thought the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and they didn't really deal with the situation we've got. And we know, talking about the American Administration, we know that 500 people have been for varying lengths of time in Guantanamo Bay without the trials and the protections that would normally be given under your jurisdiction and ours. And people say, well hold on, if this is a model war, if these are for high ideals, if this is for the spread of the liberal democracy of which you speak here, how can that be? You're breaking your own code of conduct? (141 words)

Q: To the Foreign Secretary in one second, but on the question of why we went to war, yes, it was said Saddam was a bad man who was a force for instability. No question about that. But the American people were told pretty straightforwardly we're in the business -- the American Administration -- of regime change. The British people were told something quite different and very distinctly different; that if it wasn't for the WMD than the whole game would be different. Now we know that those weapons didn't exist in the way that we were told they existed. And Mr. Blair tonight persistently -- that the argument in Britain was about regime change, and yet we now know don't we because of the arguments that went on and the leaks we've had from the discussions in Washington that Mr. Blair's party was regime change all along (147 words).

Q: But the question is not whether liberal democracy -- you talked about this in your lecture on the eve of this program -- is a good thing or a bad thing, as most people in this country, as in yours, think it is a desirable state. The question is how you go about bringing it. Now let me remind you and I'm sure you know these words from President Bush himself in the presidential debate just before he was elected October 2000. He said, if we're an arrogant nation, they will resent us -- speaking about the United States. Now the problem is that many people who try to look at this fair-mindedly, look for example at the question of extraordinary rendition, people taken to third countries where there may be practices that amount under international convention as to torture and they know that they go through our airspace. And the government said, well, really request every time -- a permission is requested every time this happens. Is a rendition flight only allowed through our airspace if the British Government has been informed? (184 words).

... and I bet no one's bothered to read all the way down to here!

Perfect book for April Fools Day: 300 pages of Gordon Brown's speeches

No, it's true.

It really isn't an April Fools day joke.

It's the day we've all been waiting for.

My publishers (Random House) have decided that 1st April is the perfect date for releasing a book of speeches made by Gordon Brown in the two years since he managed to get rid of Tony Blair.

How on earth did he find a publisher?

As I'm quite an expert on the difficulties of getting books published (for more on which see HERE) and on how awful most of his speeches are, I can't help wondering how he managed to find a publisher at all.

All I can think of is that the CEO of Random House is Gail Rebuck, who also happens to be the wife of Philip Gould (aka Baron Gould of Brookwood) - close advisor to Tony Blair and New Labour on polling, spin and anything else to do with communication that you can think of.

So was it the New Labour network that landed a publisher for Brown, or does the April 1st publication date mean that it's a not very subtle form of Blairite revenge?

And/or:

If you don't feel like buying the book, you can always browse through this selection of posts about Brown's speech-making - which, rather worryingly, is beginning to make me think that I might have another 300 page book on his speeches ready for 1st April 2011: