Dan Dan The Baguette Man

"I'm off to buy baguettes!" whispered an excited Dan into my ear as I roused from a snow-dreaming glorious sleep. Outside it was still chucking it down with promise-of-piste-perfection snow, and out my snow man went into the white morning wearing the most excellent snow boots that we'd scooped from some sort of teenager on previous mountain work. I could visualise his homecoming then + there, and quickly decided that I definitely needed to get up, if not for the promise of another introductory day to mountain life, then certainly for the promise of the gorgeous photo that it would make as he returned home to our toasty flat. .

As the snow continued to pelt it down from the low, mountain swamping clouds I started feeling uneasy about the imminent driving that we were going to have to do for first part of our training. Left hand drive, in the snow storm, on icy roads, in the dark, in my boss' really expensive car, on the right hand side of the road : all amounting to my mountainous list of fear. Miraculously though, 3 ½ hours later, with a dramatically increased heart rate + fashioning the very 'neighbours sweat patch' I've always destined for, we arrived at Geneva airport + picked up another bunch of colleagues for the season. A much more accomplished Dan wheeled us back to safety and gasping, we hit our first local bar for an extortionate pint of the white stuff to exchange comedy broken French conversations with an English barmaid firing back the same Anglo attempt, resulting in our first laffs at the local.