Article for 2010 Apr 02
Part of the “Easter 2010” series.
2010
2010 Apr
Apr 02 Good Fri “Song of the Ski” 
Cairn Gorm Mountain was open for skiers and snowboarders today. I know because I was there. Most of the queues were negligible (unlike last February), probably because of the date and the inaccessibility of the funicular to the top. The funicular had become stuck in the heavy snows! I made up some alternative lyrics for Funiculí Funiculá1:
Here we will ski down snowy Cairn Gorm
Where some thing dumbly is out-of-form
The train’s under the snow - we’ve to take the T-bar2
And not travel by Funiculí Funiculá.
I found that skiing is very much like horse-riding. Reminiscing about my own equine verse (not on Duncan’s Childhood Blog because it’s terrible), I thought:
Oh, I am riding a pony
Up down up down up down turn!
And it’s far from gloomy
Up down up down up down turn!
The “horse”’s name is Coire na Ciste
Up down up down up down turn!
But it’s not a horse: it’s a Cairn Gorm piste!
Up down up down up down turn!
When I wasn’t focussing on the snow in front and trying not to fall/injure some-one/kill myself/veer off-piste/bend my elbows/make up rubbish songs, I looked to the skies: I had my own demonstration of cirrus (wispy) cloud formation above Cairn Gorm’s summit. Beautiful.
Not having fallen or crashed once while skiing is a miracle; even when Mum ignored the “experts only” signs and led us across an off-piste gully called the West Wall, I still never fell. The West Wall is graded as a red run (difficult). My sisters and I are only cautious Intermediates! My knee was okay though (I hurt it in February).
Footnotes
1 A famous Italian song about a funicular railiway. Funiculí Funiculá doesn’t actually mean anything; “funicular” in Italian is funicolare.
2 On the T-bar tow, which has a T-shaped piece of metal which pulls skiers/snowboarders by the thighs up a hill.