Ignore Swiss tradition at your peril

I am gutted that Poppy has missed out on the school trip of the year. I should have seen it coming.

In November last year we had a letter about a ski-ing holiday that is a tradition at the school for the children from Class 3 onwards. It’s a week on the slopes with a few teachers – including Poppy’s favourite ever teacher – and it only costs 400sfr.

So Poppy arrives home waving the letter, really excited about the prospect of going on holiday with her classmates. But a phone call to the school a few minutes later and I had the awful job of breaking the news to her that she couldn’t go. It’s not for beginners. Because everyone can ski here. As soon as toddlers can toddle, they are carted off to the slopes to learn to ski (and the ice rink to skate – I could not believe the amount of very capable teeny tots there were when we went ice-skating at the various pop up rinks over Christmas)

We have spent two SportFerien here now. The clue is in the name. Sports holiday. But instead, we took the advantage of the two weeks off to go visiting relatives and friends in the UK whom we hadn’t manage to see over Christmas. Instead - I realise now - we should have been doing what everyone else does, and hit the slopes. While cruising around the UK in those two weeks we had a vague notion that something was wrong and would toy with the idea that we could do a weekend on the slopes somewhere on our return (the snow sports season lasts until April!) 

But it just seemed a mammoth task – the exorbitant cost, where do we go, what do we need, just how do we go about it, coupled with the fact that I have never skied in my life – hasn’t someone just died in a ski-ing accident, how will we cope if I break my leg, etc, etc that time passed by and we never went. And ski school (for us beginners) takes place only from Monday to Friday. Which I guess is why the SportFerien was invented in the first place (those bloody efficient Swiss)

And now as SportFerien approaches and I seek to right the wrong I have done to my daughter, I have made the hasty decision to book a whole week in ski school for myself and my two daughters next week (and it was incredibly easy - the person I spoke to spoke great English, told me everything I needed to know and gave me the total cost there and then) And when I stop thinking about all those things above that could go disasterously wrong, I’m very, very excited about it. Should have done it years ago…