PARALLEL TURNS AND COMIC TURNS

A long, long time ago, before all of our spare physical energy and free time became dominated by farm work, we used to spend a week or two every year skiing, normally somewhere in the Alps…

While I began going on winter sports holidays from a very young age, Dido, for contractual reasons (to avoid injury) was only able to start skiing after she retired from the ballet; which was highly ironic, seeing as she was forced to give up her professional career due to an injury she acquired dancing at Covent Garden…

Another irony was that our final skiing holiday was in the Spanish Pyrenees, at the culmination of the trip we made to find our finca in southern Spain, the very finca that would put an end to our skiing adventures…

While in the early years we missed the thrills and spills, the adrenaline rush of schussing down the pistes, the spectacular Alpine scenery, and the fun apres-ski, gradually, the process of building up our little farm offered even more feelings of pleasure and accomplishment…

However, as my seemingly never-ending trawl through my old artwork continues, I’ve recently rediscovered a pile of cartoons I did as a 12 and 13-year-old boy, on one or two of my very earliest ski-trips, and which brought amusing winter memories flooding back…

Given the timeframe, it’s obvious why ski-school seems to be the dominant theme…

Although we skiid in Switzerland, Austria, France and even Greece, we eventually fell in love with the north-Italian resort of Courmayeur and returned there numerous times…

One or two readers of this piece might even recognize my depictions of them in these cartoons, and if so, I hope their memories are as happy as my own…