Avoiding A Telling Off

I have spent much of the last six months either telling people off or holding back from telling people off. However today the tables turned and was told off by two separate people.

The first was my hairdresser. He was horrified that I had not visited him in so long and greeted me with the delightful phrase 'Well we have to get rid of that fluff don't we?' and ended with 'Come back in SIX to EIGHT weeks, DO NOT leave it any longer this time'.

The second person to tell me off was a blast from the past, the fashion designer, one of my great friends of season number one for those of you new to the blog. I popped into where she worked today to say hello after my long trip away. After getting over the delight of seeing each other after all this time and after she had lulled me into a false sense of security she let rip;

'I cannot believe you have fallen in love with a chef again!'

'Well I liked him a lot but but I wouldn't say I was in love with him, I don't think I actually fell in love with any of them' I replied.

This was apparently a very unsatisfactory answer for the fashion designer. A look of hatred flashed through her eyes.

'If I'd have been there it would not have happened, I would not have let that happen'

'Well it probably would have...well there was this bottle of vodka ...and he was actually quite nice'

If the fashion designer had had a handbag with her she would have hit me with it at that point.

And that is where she started to get hysterical,
'I just hate chefs as a breed, I just hate them, and now you are going to marry him, you are going to get married to this chef'.

I uttered denials that I was not going to get married but she wasn't listening and instead told me that should I get married she would burst into the back of the church to stop all proceedings.

She really is very rude about chefs!

One day - so many airports.

A few weeks ago I thought the moment would never come, the moment where I landed down in Britain. And on Saturday I did it twice. I flew from Geneva to Heathrow and then from Heathrow to Manchester. 

All in all it was a long day, the morning spent wandering aimlessly from Chamonix, contemplating just how different it was from Meribel and trying, and failing to see any actual ski lifts. I did however see a French hippy woman wandering around with no shoes on. And I had a fabulous burger from a tiny little shack called the Annex. My staff accommodation was also called the Annex and was an absolutely disgusting place in which I point blank refused to spend any time what so ever, so the decision to eat food produced in a place with the same name was only made when my companions had raved about the place as they had visited it only hours before hand when they were drunk, and were now returning for sobered up seconds. 

At 3.15pm, myself and two other people finally got into a van and went to the airport. I brought with me four  of the best packed bags anyone has every seen, within them was a huge amount of clothes, ski boots, a double duvet, speakers, a bottle of vodka and a bottle of gin, two other pairs of shoes, a laptop, make up, toiletries and a variety of other things totally (not?) necessary for a life in the mountains. To help you understand just how impressive this packing was it wasn't 4 suitcases, it was 1 suitcase, 1 boot bag, 1 carry all and one hand luggage bag. Now that was impressive packing. It did however cost me £68 to put it all on the aeroplane. As we checked in I found myself trying to take the other two's passports and tickets in case they lost them, even though both of them were grown men. 

Now what the customs people don't tell you is that although they specify that you are only allowed one hand luggage bag on the plane, they do not specify how many coats and jumpers you are allowed to take through. I tested this yesterday by taking through two ski coats and a massive woolly jumper. For the first set of customs I put one coat inside the other and no one seemed to notice or to care and then didn't even bother for the second. 

So.. getting everyone's luggage onto the plane proved to be the easy bit of the journey. As we moved on to go through security I was stopped and pulled to one side to have my bag searched. Now, even though you know that there is nothing in your suitcase that shouldn't be there, there is always a moment of terror in case someone, somehow has managed to get into your suitcase and plant drugs/knives/ a bomb and a life spent in prison flashes before your eyes.

Anyway the security woman opens up my bag and sees that inside it are a huge amount of DVDs, 'Ah' she says in her Swiss accent, 'are you a  DJ?' I just smiled, and tried to look how I imagine a cool female DJ to look, as she took the top DVD, presuming it to be a CD from my imaginary lucrative DJ career and waved it at the man who spotted my bag as a potential terrorist threat and asked him if that was what he had seen in my bag. What she didn't notice and I did was that the DVD that she was waving round Geneva airport had two words written on it, and those two words were 'Lesbian Vampires'. To those who haven't heard of the very silly spoof film Lesbian Vampire Killers, a DVD entitled Lesbian Vampires could make them think I was into some very very dodgy porn film, and this in turn could have got me into a lot of trouble with customs. Luckily however she just put the DVD back and I went on my way. 

Although I would have loved to do a lot of shopping in the airport, I remembered that I am in fact poor and cannot afford to shop in the Gucci and Chanel shops that make up Geneva airport. So the boys decided that we should instead look for a bar. They were both incensed that there was not a Wetherspoons in said airport and were quickly disheartened that, as we walked round, the only place selling alcohol was the Champagne and Oyster bar. Now I would have loved to while away the hours at the Champagne and Oyster bar but unfortunately the boys were not of that same opinion, and we made two laps of the airport, with them both chuntering loudly about there displeasure with the whole situation before I spotted a little place with an actual beer tap. The two boys visibly relaxed and finally stopped moaning. 

An hour later we boarded the aeroplane to Heathrow and, like a child on his first aeroplane ride, one of the boys I was with, JL, made it absolutely clear that he wanted to sit by the window. I made it clear that if he was going to sit next to the window then he couldn't be getting up and going to the toilet every few minutes. He took this so much to heart that by the time we landed in Heathrow he was in so much pain that he ran at the speed of light to the bathroom in the airport.  

We were literally rushed through Heathrow and onto the next plane, without any time to buy the food we were so desperate for by then. 

The next flight went by in a blur, with JL deciding he didn't really want to sit by the window again. What we did find out though, that we had missed on the first flight, is that when the BA air hostesses come round with their trolley offering the free chicken tikka wrap and a drink, is that they only have the soft drinks on display and they actually have a whole range of things hidden away inside the trolley! All you have to do is ask! Wine it was. 

We got to Manchester and waited for our bags, first one came off, then all of mine. But there was nothing for JL. His bag it turned out was sat waiting for him in Heathrow. It also turned out that that bag contained every item of clothing he owned other than what he was wearing.  

It was a slightly smelly few days for him until his bag was delivered to his house.

Here We Go Again! Meribel 2012-13

Well here I am, not quite back in the city yet but I said goodbye to Meribel yesterday and now I am in Chamonix which is the biggest place I have been to in almost 6 months, its rather overwhelming really, it has a Japanese restaurant and everything. God knows how I am going to feel when I get back to London in a weeks time. Actually, who am I kidding, I am going to bloody love it .

So last year when I started this blog about life as a Seasonaire in Meribel I started right back at the beginning when I got off the plane in Geneva and went off for two weeks of management training. This time I am going to start at the end. Partly because at this time I haven't even started to recover from the season and, as a result, my mind is still soup due to lack of sleep and free time, so, I can only recall things that happened in the last few days. And partly as an introduction to some new readers to the staff I put on the coach back to England only a couple of days ago.

Well the day before yesterday I watched and waved as a double decker coach pulled away, a coach full of people I had spent every day of the last five months with. They differed in every way from the staff that my loyal readers have been reading about for the past year.  Differed in personality and temperament but at the same time, they were the same; they still all got drunk, they still had sex with anything that they could pin down for long enough, they still fell in and out of love faster that in takes to eat staff dinner, they still drove me mad, did ridiculously stupid things, turned up late, turned up hanging out of their arses.

And yet they were all new.

The girl whose love of life and of the opposite sex meant she, unwittingly, totally embodied the feminist idea that was first declared by Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 'Vindication of the Rights of Women'. This girl just thought she was enjoying having a lot of sex, I thought she was the perfect feminist creation.

The two boys who lived the seasonaire life as it should be lived and never let being thrown up upon by a variety of girls put them off.

The chef who, even though he was desperate to have sex for a second time in his life (he said he had had sex once, even though he couldn't quite remember it), did not quite manage it. In fact he didn't really manage to do anything with any females, other than the hug I gave him when he left. Despite his eternal optimism and enthusiasm.

The other chef, the one I quickly learned to care very deeply about, despite him being 2 days off being born in the 1990s, despite his love of setting things on fire, despite everything, he was, often, my rock, when times got hard and I just needed someone to talk to, he was there, and I will care about him for the rest of my life. It might not have been love, but it was a very deep rooted friendship. That is how I saw it anyway. This same  chef was in Meribel the year before and had spent the summer reading this blog and has spent the winter slightly dreading what I would write about him. Well my dearest darling - keep  on wondering and waiting.

And so it has come to an end. And it is raining in Chamonix. As we left Meribel last night the sun was shinning, the rivers were running with the melting snow and we had the first MacDonald's any of us had had in months.

And now is the time to write it all down, the engagements, the fights, the drunken behaviour, why I turned away from the Ram Raid and the time I was propositioned by five men in the same evening.  

The End is nigh

So

That is it

The last guest food to go out of our kitchen has just gone.

It was a white chocolate and raspberry cheesecake.

I have never been brought to tears by a cheesecake before. I didn't think I would be this sad to see the end, to be honest I started counting down the end of the season sometime at the beginning of February. But tonight is a sad night, and a happy night all at the same time.

But there it is, I a sad, and I watched my boys working today for the last time and I realised how much I will miss all my staff. I'm sure they wont miss me, how many people have ever said 'Oooh I really miss my old boss?' Very few I expect. But I will miss them, and I will worry about them even though they don't need worrying about and I will care about them all for a long time to come.

Bloody soppy I am tonight eh! I started work at 7.30 this morning and it 21.50 now so maybe I have been at work so long that I am going mad. Maybe I worked so long because I wanted to soak up the last few hours of being here. I don't know why I wanted to soak it all up today, I haven't had the slightest desire to do that at all for the last 5 months.

Oh well, I better go to bed before I start crying in front of the staff. Won't want to ruin my image now would I?

I'm going to compile a play list of sad 'saying good bye songs'

Goodbye - The Spice Girls
Time to Say Goodbye - Andrea Bocelli
The Power of Goodbye - Madonna
Every time We Say Goodbye - Peggy Mann


You get the picture

Are my eyes deceiving me, is there finally a new Seasonaire in the City post???

Yes, yes there is. And I'm not even back in the UK yet but I will be back in 11 days (thats 264 hours or 15840 minutes).

So I took some time off writing. This wasn't actually an active decision for the first couple of months, but it was a choice between spending my free time away from the hotel that has been my home for this long, cold, snowy winter or spending my free time in my office, in front of a computer being asked questions about keys/ hot tubs/ rotas/ menus or weird medical conditions staff and guests felt they could potentially have developed. To be honest in my spare time I mainly balanced my laptop on the sink, put on a film and had a bath. Hard core I am (and very clean)!

So I thought I would write this quick post to remind you all that I will be home soon. Home and ready to write all about my last six months. It was completely different from last season (apart from my naked chef stories, there was one of those this season too, but when isn't there??)

('Just one naked chef?' I hear you cry -

Well the season isn't over yet)


So to come - stories of the 20 year old virgin chef, fire misadventures, finding a love of skiing, a romance, a fight, being the boss, someone with a phobia of peas and how I learnt the meaning of the phrase 'Finger blasting'

11 days to go!