Oh joy! I learned this weekend that there is new Chris Morris TV product comming to a Channel 4 near you this month. This is going to totally rock. I guarantee it!

It's funny because I was walking down Newburgh Street in Soho on Saturday night and the thought hit me that this is pure Nathan Barley territory. There were shops there with special jeans imported from Japan for £120, because, like, they are from JAPAN. And dude, you can't afford them.

But I'm sorry to see that Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt are in it. Fair enough, I believe they are brilliant comedians but I've always been dead against them purely because Noel has always sported the kind of wild hair statement that I hate (My hatred is rare and always unreasonable). The original Nathan Barley stories on TVGoHome (kids: that link is full of bad language which is neither big or clever) used to treat that kind of tonsorial nonsense with the contempt it deserves.

"More candid scenes from the life of Nathan Barley, an odious twentysomething toff and media wannabe who generally deserves to die. This week: Nathan spends a king's ransom on a self-consciously 'scruffy' haircut and bags a job as a presenter on a new youth-oriented TV show produced by his overpaid womanizing uncle"

UPDATE: A friend has pointed me to what looks like the website for the show: looks ace. it's got a couple of trailers and a fantastic advert for a new mobile phone - just click on the Wasp link in the corner. It's everything that is wrong with the media and techno-fetishism and I salute them.

POW! POW! POW! Powder. The Cold Smoke. Snow. Last week I was in Courchevel and it snowed and snowed and snowed. We must have had nearly 100cms of fresh in the week we were there and all that added up to some of the best powder skiing I've ever had. It was great to be skiing anyway - it's so zen. You have to be 'in the moment' when you are skiing because the bottom line is you are sliding downhill on two pieces of wood so the alternative to concentrating is, erm, death! I love it.

So it was a great holiday. With everything that has happened in the last few months I was really looking forward to it and I wasn't disapointed. We (that's Alex and Jonny, their daughter (my god-daugher) Jessica and Alex's sister Victoria) traveled courtesy of Ski Scott Dunn purveyors of pukka chalet holidays. I can now confirm that it IS worth throwing money at a ski holiday because it was worth every penny. The service was excellent and the food and drink (yes readers: drink!) was top notch.

Monday was the only sunny day in fact. The snow conditions weren't bad but it was clear that more was needed. Still it was great to get our ski mojo working again in some nice sunny weather. Monday afternoon was meant to be the first session I'd booked for a ski clinic with New Generation ski school. But they had rung me in the morning to say that nobody else had booked so would I like a half-day private lesson instead. It was great. My instructor, Oli, was very good and gave me some excellent tips. Similar sort of things to what I had been told in Canada (but forgotten) but he put some things in a different way which really helped.

Tuesday saw the snow come and it really hardly stopped for the rest of the week! I was desperate to get some fresh tracks early on Wednesday morning so as the others enjoyed their breakfast (and wondered if I had gone crazy) I set off for some freshies. Luckily staying in Courchevel 1850 means you can go downhill before you need to go uphill so there's no need to wait for the lifts to open. In fact I missed a trick because I didn't realise I could reach one particularly long run but I'd set my heart on first tracks under the Tovets chair lift. I got my wish and enjoyed boot-deep powder all the way.



I tried the same trick on Friday morning and got two runs down before anyone else tried it but by now it was knee deep and even more fabulous. Good times.

So most of Tuesday morning was a frantic charge around the hill looking for freshies and it was great. Unfortunately my adventurous spirit nearly got me into trouble. You see in Fernie you could ski anywhere and be confident that you would end up on a run back to the base. Crazed by all the snow I didn't think twice before dropping off the side of a run to Courcheveal 1450 and into the trees. According to the piste map I should come out onto another run lower down. The first few turns were great but as I went on the trees got tighter and tighter and I actually had no idea where I was.



It was very pretty but a very stupid idea, especially as I was on my own. I ended up slowly manoeuvering my way downhill until I ended up on the piste again. I was absolutely knackered and happy to hook up with Alex, Jonny and Victoria down in La Tania.



I also had the pleasure of half a day's skiing later in the week with Joe Oppenheimer, his wife, father and assorted friends courtesy his wife Wim recognising me in a mountain restaraunt. I made a good impression by completely failing to recognise her at first and then when I did, getting her name wrong. Well done John.

Mention must go to our excellent chalet host, Catherine. She is a Cordon Bleu trained chef, has just finished a PhD in Microbiology at Cambridge and was working a ski season before heading off to Harvard to do post-doctoral research into cures for Malaria! I don't ask for much in a woman but that pretty much qualifies you as a total dreamboat :)

As well as having a lesson I was keen to try and remember some of my instructor training and Alex, Jonny and Victoria were all willing guinea pigs. I tried to give them a few pointers during the week but we did one proper lesson which I really enjoyed doing. They seemed to enjoy it too and I honestly think they were all skiing better by the end of the week. That may have had something to do with getting a lesson from a proper instructor as well but I was gratified to learn that he was telling them the same things that I was!

Saturday and Sunday were again rather epic powder days. I found some excellent, safe(ish) tree skiing and the undisturbed snow in the trees was over waist deep in places. There were any number of slopes offering proper face shots, where the combination of snow depth and slope steepness sends the snow washing ahead like a bow wave you ski through. One particular run, just next to the chairlift offered about 20 meters of non-stop face shots. It was extraordinary to ski through this curtain of snow billowing in front of you so that every breath you took you swallowed more snow. It may not sound it - but believe me it was great!

But after all the POW! there was also a bit of BIF! and BANG! We had a half day on Sunday before heading back to the airport. On what was going to be my penultimate run I decided to grab a few last off-piste turns. I found a lovely pitch to ski down but right at the bottom I hit a buried rock square on the knee. I have to say it was agony and having rescued my skis, trying to ski home on basically one leg was not enjoyable. Still it was right at the end and thanks I think to the prodigious amounts of Vitamin I (400mg Ibuprofen) I had been taking all week the swelling wasn't too bad. I'm still limping a bit now - but I'm being very brave.

Lastly let me leave you with a picture of Jessica and her proud parents. I thought she was sweet and wonderfully behaved all week. In fact she hardly needed any spiritual guidance at all, but I was glad to be on hand just in case:

Not much blog-action recently eh? Things have mostly been quiet. Hanging out with dad - he's doing OK. Going to work - bit boring. Planning some more NONSTOPNEWS - exciting. And then last week - skiing in France which was fantastic. The full story on that to follow soon.

I went to Milton Keynes yesterday. For some fun. The good news is that it was fun. I went to the snowdome-indoor-skiing-kind-a-thing and it was great. I'm going proper skiing in two weeks (yay!) and I wanted to check if I could remember how to do it. Well the old magic is still there and I was even complimented on my technique by a lady in the cafeteria afterwards! You do a lot of queing for not much skiing but it was still great to be back sliding again. However MK can't compete on the view front, the last day I was on my skis it looked like this:

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Milton Keynes is a weird place, even it's football team is an offence against nature. It seems like a bit of American urban planning has been airlifted into Bedfordshire. There is something Magnus Mills-y about the place. Everything seems normal but maybe too normal and that's the problem. Eerie.