Recreation

I can’t shake off the feeling that M is trying to turn our family into a breakfast cereal commercial. He’s always trying to get us to do activities that families in muesli adverts do and he absolute insists that we do it together as one unit.

I think it’s because he works so much. His leisure hours are few and he wants something to show for them.

“Plan something for us to do this weekend,” he says. “I don’t want to just sit around the house watching tv.”

“You don’t?” I ask. “Because you really do seem to enjoy that.”

“No, I don’t. We’re wasting our lives away. Let’s go skiing. Or biking. Hey, that reminds me: did you call that place about the scuba diving lessons?”

M doesn’t regard time spent lounging around the house playing Uno and eating peanuts as a relaxing and enjoyable way to bond with family members. For him, these are hours of his life that he’ll never see again.

The kids are in favour of the muesli lifestyle. What middle-school-aged earthlings wouldn’t be? They love skiing and boating and swimming. The bottle-neck, if you’ll permit the shapely metaphor, is me. There was a time I enjoyed a selection of vigorous outdoor pursuits but I don’t anymore. If it involves pain, hypothermia or the possibility of having to send up emergency flares, I’m just not interested. And it is my conviction that I should be allowed to enjoy my early-middle years in dignity, not squeezed into a wetsuit poking my finger into holes in a reef.

This week, with the holidays looming and no one else in the family excited at the prospect of playing Pictionary beside the Christmas tree, I’ve yielded to popular opinion and booked us a ski holiday. But I would like to let the record show that I did so against my better judgement and if I return from the trip with an ankle that spins like a loose nut when flicked, let it be on their heads.

I can't say that I ever enjoyed getting bashed in the back of the calves by chair lifts or leaving part of my face on low-hanging tree branches but at a certain time in my life I considered these a fair trade-off for the pleasure of swooshing down a snowy slope with the wind in my face and my ear tips breaking off.

But nowadays I just think: why? Ski resorts have cosy hotels with crackling fireplaces. Why should I risk injury, exhaustion and humiliation on the slopes when I could be curled up in front of a fireplace, drinking hot chocolate and laughing at the misfortunes of others?

Ironically, it’s M who risks injury more than the rest of us. The kids are supple and can collapse into a fall the way you should. I learned to ski while young and always stay well within the limits of my fading abilities. M, on the other hand, is a newish skier but doesn’t see why that should stop him going on the difficult runs. He doesn’t crash often but when he does it’s dramatic.

Not for him the quiet sinking into a puffy bank of snow. When he goes down it’s like a clothesline pole being flung onto frozen ground. There’s the sense of body parts staying straight that shouldn’t, and then all is obliterated in a cloud of snow that blinds skiers two hills over.

When the snow has settled M may be found lying in a crumpled heap, one gloved hand stabbing ineffectually at a binding that won’t release the leg wrapped around his head. He will have hurt himself in at least one permanent and significant way but he will be undeterred. While I implore him to return immediately to the chalet and possibly doctor’s office, M quietly collects his scattered bits from the hillside and pushes off, saying we can still get two runs in before lunch if we don’t waste time.

But I have a plan this year. I've booked a chalet right on the ski hill and hope to be able to nip in to the room to warm up or have a nap while the others are busy skiing the upper slopes. Just before the lifts close for the day I'll swoop up behind them, spraying them lightly with snow as I skid to a stop, and say, "Hey you guys, where've you been? I've been all over the mountain looking for you."

That'd make a pretty good muesli ad, wouldn't it?

Raining

It’s finally raining and the effect on the household is electric. The kids are tearing around shrieking and for the first time in months I’m enjoying hot tea without sitting under the air conditioner.

We’ve lived in perpetual summer for four years. Dubai only had three seasonal variations: hot, really hot and kids, come inside, your hair is on fire. And when we holiday in Canada in summertime it’s, well, summertime. “Gosh, what a winter we had!” people tell us when we arrive to cloudless blue skies and a molten sun. “You wouldn’t know it now but two weeks ago we had to tunnel through a ten-foot snow drift to get to the car. What amazing timing that you’ve arrived now — they just said on the news it’s going to be the hottest week in half a century.”

A particular weariness grips me at such times and I yearn for a cool, rain-spattered morning. I’d like to be able to do housework wearing something more than a bra. I want to curl up with a book under a blanket on a cold evening instead of bickering over the set point of the air conditioner with M, who believes that normal room temperature is 27 degrees C and anything cooler is just asking for pneumonia.

I’m not fool enough to actually wish to live somewhere cold, though. Like I was as a teenager on the farm in Alberta when I bitterly declared that I was going to get “as far away from here as possible.” I didn’t understand then the importance of being careful what you wish for.

No, without a lawyer beside me to put it into language that Fate cannot find a loophole around, I won’t wish for that. The company M works for doesn’t have an office in Greenland but if I start wishing for a cooler place you can bet your kids' inheritance that they’ll decide there ought to be an office in Greenland and that M is the just the man to run it.