To ski or not to ski

'Falling over was easy, even on the flat; getting up was disastrous;

- Pamela Goodman

SOME friends have kindly invited us to join them on a skiing holiday, but, after much thought, we have declined. There were three strands to our decision-making process. The first, rather vulgarly perhaps, involved the cost. Parsimonious as it may sound, I have struggled of late with the value-for-money aspect of skiing. The second involved climate change, far too weighty a topic to dwell on for long in this column, so let's just say that the reliability of snow and perfect skiing conditions are not what they used to be. The third factor, and most personally significant, involved safety or, put another way, risk. The older I get, the less keen I am on hurtling down a mountain, for fear of damaging a joint, a bone or a ligament beyond reasonable repair. Entangled, too, in my safety concerns are the crowds the barging, marauding, lunatic mobs (snowboarders in the main) who fly down the pistes without the slightest concern for the genteel, fair-weather skiers in their mi