I’ve started off on the skiing in Italy lark so I might as well finish the story where I left off. With my crotch up somewhere around my jaw, I think it was.

I was with my usual sidekick in travel, dear Kylie. Everything was perfect (besides said wedge, naturally): the snow was downy, the air crisp, the mountains more than high enough for debilitating injury. We set forth bravely on what appeared to be a gentle incline but rapidly turned into a veritable cliff, resulting in much wild flailing and hysterical shrieking, and cries of our planned emergency call, ‘Aussie Down!’

Somehow I managed a relatively calculated crash into a bank off to the left, which I lurched over and found to my eternal gratitude that I’d landed safely on the edge of the beginners’ run. Looking back for Kylz, the sight left me weeping with gales of laughter.

Ever the adventurer, she was skidding backwards down the black run, picking up ever more pace, shrieking and clinging for dear life to her stocks (though an ice pick might have been a more appropriate tool of the moment). It was long minutes before she was able to tumble over the run to the safety of the embankment. There, she turned to face the small crowd of Italians who had gathered to observe our ordeal with a kind of languid amusement, thrust her stocks skyward, and, teetering dramatically on the precipice, cried ‘Are you not entertained?! Is this not why you have come?!!!’

At this brash Yank stepped out of the crown and declared - ‘Oh, it’s ok! She’s Aussie - they bounce! Finally, she collapsed in a heap next to me, where we lay gasping in the thin Alpine air and pondering our fragile existence.