Japanese/Australian Business Women's challenge at Mt Buller. Silver medal in skiing, gold medal in drinking schnapps.

Instructions for skiing are simple. First spend five winters and three bank accounts skiing in Austria. Ditto for Australia.  This means you get winter 12 months of the year and a great suntan - from the neck up. Learn to lie a lot about your skills. Good marks at school, sporting awards, three uni degrees are worth nothing. Tell bosses you can wash dishes, repair skis, cook, speak fluent German, teach skiing - anything so you can get a job.

I can do all of these things. Well, I can - now. (Well, OK, OK, so I'm lying about the cooking bit...)

I leant to ski as a kid. The skiing was the easy bit. Learning how to ride the tows was the difficult part of the exercise. My first attempt went something like this....

'Tell the boy that it is your first time on a poma.' said our ski instructor. 'It is not very difficult. And remember, don't sit down.'
Well anyone with half a brain knew a poma was a standing tow, the chairlift was the one you sat on. I nodded, slid confidently forward and looked up at the tow operator.

'It's my first.....' 

I never got to finish the sentence. The boy shoved a poma at me and pulled the release switch. The tow shot off with an almighty lunge forwards. I counterbalanced with a violent jerk backwards. And immediately found myself sprawled in a sitting position in the snow. In front of me the poma continued its lone journey upwards. With a long-suffering sigh, the tow operator extracted his feet from under by bruised backside, hauled me upright and placed me in the starting gates once more.

'What did you sit down for?' he demanded.

'I didn't sit down!' I was indignant. 'I merely over reacted to a violent forward force acting upon my inertia.'

He wasn't impressed. I guess he'd heard that a million times before.

Through the trees at St Anton am Arlberg, Austria