We’re ready to ski down the slopes – and up the social ladder

Sandra Parsons never got round to taking her family to the snow, but learning on a simulator awoke her inner skier – and her social ambition

March 13, 2007
The Times

I have always thought that as an indicator of the British class system, skiing is hard to beat. I’ve never met anyone who went to public school who wasn’t also a brilliant skier, and you won’t find many upscale families who don’t go for at least a week’s skiing at either February half-term or the Easter holidays.

Along with tennis and piano, it was my early ambition to have my children learn the requisite skills almost as soon as they could walk. But time, money and — let’s be honest — the sheer chaos of working motherhood, all conspired to thwart this perhaps rather pompous aim. The result is that, out of ten, we have scored maybe two for piano and tennis, and nul points for skiing.

So an invitation for the family to try a new ski simulator, while perhaps not relighting the fires of my much-dampened social ambition, did at least set off a spark. In the dark days of January, we presented ourselves at the Realli-Ski Centre in Radlett, near Watford.

I know nothing about skiing, but quite a lot about what makes a good idea, and Realli-Ski is a really, really good idea. The invention of Daniel Hawkes and Jonathan Showan, it combines their hydraulic engineering and computer skills to provide a safe and incredibly fast way of learning to ski — indoors.

There are four simulators, housed in, appropriately, a newly built wooden chalet-style building. You are given proper boots and skis, strapped into a harness that will prevent you from falling, and step on to a machine with a white surface that looks not unlike Velcro.

Then a qualified ski instructor programmes the computer and the Velcro-like surface tilts and moves accordingly.

The simulators replicate the full gamut of ski slopes from the slow, weeny gradient of the nursery foothills to the vertical whiz of a black diamond run. You can learn to ski on them; you can also improve your technique at any level, because all lessons are given by qualified ski instructors. Jonathan and Daniel claim that half an hour on the Realli-Ski simulator is the equivalent of spending five hours on a dry ski slope.

I wouldn’t know, but I can tell you this: we progressed in our half an hour from basic snow ploughs to parallel turns done, in my 11-year-old daughter’s case, at black diamond run speed and tilt (“an absolute natural”, marvelled the instructor) and at red run speed and tilt in mine.

My five-year-old son had a separate 15-minute lesson which he enjoyed, but the same could not be said of my husband, also a virgin skier, who had to stop after only five minutes because of the pain in his feet. This appears to be due to a peculiarity of the shape of his heel and was a complication we could have done without, given that Isabella and I were by now mentally swishing down the slopes for real and discussing the merits of the Alps versus the Dolomites with the Realli-Ski staff.

Having now discovered what a family skiing holiday for four actually costs during school holiday time, I have to confess that so far this vision has remained just that, and so I am unable to report how we fared on the real mountainside.

But the experience was so good that we are determined to go next year — so our social standing may after all be on the up.