Courmayeur – ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA

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…

The travel destinations I have liked most have had two things in common; good food and drink, and dramatic landscape. For me, these are the two essentials that not only ensure an enjoyable trip, but also make me want to return again and again.

Thus far in my life, no country has consistently epitomised those two qualities more than Italy, and one trip there in particular stands out for me as an exemplar.

2 Setting off from Hel Brunner — Setting off on Hel Brunner

During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I was fortunate enough to ski Christmas and New Year at the Italian Alpine resort of Courmayeur. And although the skiing itself was not particularly challenging, this was more than compensated for by Courmayeur’s spectacular location at the foot of Western Europe’s tallest mountain, Mont Blanc (Monte Bianco) and the hearty, local Valdostana cuisine. Days spent skiing through landscape straight out of a Martini commercial, followed by evenings dining on rich chamois stews washed down with copious amounts of black-red Nebbiolo wines made for exceedingly happy times.

3 Monte Bianco from Courmayeur — Mont Blanc (Monte Bianco) from Courmayeur

Then, in 1981, I had an Italian girlfriend from a village near Cremona, only a three-hour drive from Courmayeur, and so decided to take a few days off from skiing to visit her.

She, in turn took me to her family apartment on the shores of Lake Garda where we spent an idyllic 48 hours where, among other wonderful things, I had my first taste of genuine Italian home cooking. But even more special than the food was the fact that we had the magisterial lake, and its enchanting winter light all to ourselves.

Fortunately I had my camera with me for both parts of what transpired as a trip of two deeply contrasting parts. The pictures presented here are digitally enhanced, sepia-filtered examples of some of the photographs I took then, designed to emulate my memories of a special time…