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.
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