It’s official. Lord Muck has gone viral. But not in a good way. When we moved to sunny Spain, I thought our skiing days were over. Don’t get me wrong, I have always loved skiing. The mountains. The air. The apres-ski. But even though his Lordship is a great skier, he has shown a surprising aptitude for getting into trouble over the years.
The signs were clear from the start. 1992. Mount Hutt. His Lordship’s first ski trip so I placed him safely in ski school and headed off to ski with friends. Come late afternoon, enjoying a well-earned beer, I spied a young woman dragging her skis behind her, sobbing. Heading over, she explained she was done. She’d wiped out so many times on her first day skiing that every inch of her body hurt. We chatted a while and I had just managed to persuade her to give it another go with me the next day, when what do I spy but a skier coming down the slope fast – wobbling, waving, totally out of control, and heading straight towards us. Before I knew it, Lord Muck had crashed into this poor girl, throwing her up into the air and flat onto her back – at which point, gathering what was left of her dignity, she left the slopes for the final time, dragging her skis behind her, sobbing.
And who could forget the final day of our La Plagne trip? Me sunbathing slopeside, vin chaud in hand, waiting for Lord Muck to be dropped off by his guide. As is the custom, when he arrived, he removed his skis and placed them upright next to the long line of skis, leaning against the bar’s wooden fence. Alas, he didn’t wedge them deep enough in the snow – and I watched in horror as his skis lurched to the left and promptly knocked over 50 pairs of skis, domino-style, almost beheading a French woman in the process. Cue me sprinting to get Lord Muck down the mountain before we faced Agincourt 2.0.
So, when he announced a surprise trip to the Sierra Nevada last week, I packed my bags with equal parts excitement and dread. However, after two days without mishap, I’d just begun to relax, when his now infamous chairlift incident happened.
It was mid-morning on day three, and we approached the top station. I hopped off and was skiing down when I heard an odd noise behind me – a curious cross between a mewing cat and a banshee in distress. Turning around, I realised Lord Muck was still on the chairlift, seemingly… stuck. Somehow, he’d forgotten to secure the front strap of his rucksack, which was now wedged tightly into the back of the chair’s mechanism. There he dangled, 20 feet in the air, legs flailing, mewing, trying with the grace of a startled pigeon to shake off the rucksack and make his escape. But not before the angry Spanish lift attendant was forced to shut down the entire lift system. Furious fellow skiers, now stranded mid-air, began filming the ordeal, slow hand clapping, providing a live audience as Lord Muck wrestled with his predicament and started to climb down, middle-aged man style. Just as the ski patrol arrived to add to his humiliation. And as if things couldn’t get more mortifying, that evening, over dinner, we discovered that the ‘Englishman’s Wild Chairlift Escape’ had gone viral. Oh, the shame…
Postcards from Andalucía, Lady Muck Style
By Catherine Saunders / Shop gifts at www.ladymuck.style
