Twenty very good reasons not to regret missing out on a ski trip.

Ski season has come to a close and the office adventure types are water-cooler-bragging about the Alps for another year. Tails of  how fresh the air is on top of Mount Smug, how the splendid views could make your eyes bleed and how exhilarating charging along fresh powdered slopes is if you’d only be richer, smarter and better looking enough to give it a try.

Of course the reality of the situation is quite different here are a few very good reasons why you should never regret missing out on a ski trip:

1)      Expensive and impractical equipment: Just the socks can set you back more than £15 and offsetting the cost your skis by saving on your daily commute is not an option.

2)      Travel and snow don’t mix: Anyone who’s spent a night on an airport floor will agree.

3)      Airport security: Somewhat especially disagreeable in winter, bound to be suspicious of your huge backpack, questionable footwear and excessive underwear.

4)      Budget airline luggage limits: Superbly inadequate for the requirements of a week below freezing.  

5)      Overbooked Hotels: Cranky staff, bad breakfast buffets and rooms that smell like heat rub, Chlamydia and shame, masquerading as pine freshness.

6)      Queues: They start at the airport and wind their way up the mountain, even the ski lift is just another queue, might as well be waiting in line for a bus in Bermondsey at fraction of the cost and effort.

7)      Ski lifts: Fearsome contraptions used for dangling unfortunates over frozen lakes to extract confessions of witchcraft in the middle-ages adapted for use in the modern era. Every now and then the operators hit the stop button and take bets on who will throw up first as you sway haplessly in the wind.

8)      Snow boots: The ridiculous, mind boggling, blister inducing footwear, hatefully designed specifically to take an agonising toll on morale.

9)      Ski school: No treat if you hated school first time around. Plus there is a real danger of losing your girl to the long haired, spandex wearing instructor possibly named Sven while flailing about like Gene Kelly on ecstasy in a pathetic attempt to remain up right.

10)  Sparkling Views: Generally shrouded in a thick mist and about three tones of falling snow.

11)   The decent: One wrong turn and you’re careering, face first, down a black run. An error likely to end abruptly, painfully and inside a tree, leaving you to rue the day your parents failed in the proper and sensible use of a prophylactic.

12)   True humiliation: There is no enjoyment in failing at something every six-year-old German can do.

13)   Germans like skiing.

14)   A chance of hospitalisation: Where the only people who speak the same language as you are the ones directly responsible for putting you there in the first place. Hopefully you have the same travel insurance as Beth Tweddle… What? Too soon?

15)   Whiskey based cocktails: Don’t taste the same in sub-zero temperatures and Peach schnapps is for teenaged girls and homeless people.

16)   Sub-zero temperatures.

17)  Avalanches: Nature’s terrorist attack, you’re always just one girlie scream away for a grizzly end.

18)  Nothing sexy about a ski holiday: A combination of huge underwear, shrinking body parts and extensive bruising ultimately sends the wrong signals.

19)   Fondue: Overrated, eat melted cheese for three days in a row and it becomes abundantly incandescent why the people who invented it also came up with the concept of commercially viable assisted suicide. Nothing good can come of Cheese, lighter fluid and third degree burns.

20)  Coach travel: On some of the most dangerous roads known to man covered in ice and snow. Why not blind fold the driver while you’re at it.