Geoff writes: last day before the conference opens tomorrow, at which point we will be glued to the computers for the next four days. So we took a few hours off to go skiing with Debi. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the snow was excellent, at least in the morning, until the sun got quite hot. Having tried to persuade Judith to ski carefully – a broken leg the day before the conference would be a bad thing – I got a bit carried away, and skied faster than I usually do. At one point I was passing a group of beginners who were taking up most of the piste, and I decided to go behind the snow cannon to avoid them. This was a mistake, since there was a shelf of snow behind it, meaning I did a very unexpected jump. I almost made it, landing back on both skis, but then lost it, and had a spectacular fall, losing both skis, but fortunately not hurting myself (or the skis).

Later on, we took a less well used piste, and there I did manage to damage my skis, going over some stones, and putting some deep gashes in them. I could still ski on them, but they didn’t turn as easily, so we’ve had to leave them to be fixed – something I hate doing, they always seem to come back worse.

As we were having sandwiches in the car park, we could see people thermalling up at Targasonne on the other side of the valley. Any other day, we would have been able to go over and fly too, but today we had to get back for the conference (and to do some publicity for the latest podcast on wave flying).

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