Authenticity.

20 July

Days off Snow: 77

Days Til Snow: 107

I hate being around faux people. I don’t understand the point of it.

Its been a heavy weekend, putting in 12 hour shifts at the shop and then getting in to a car to help and old friend out with cooking for staff at a festival.

When I was 14 I got a job washing dishes in a pub, two years later I was cooking. While everyone else my age was pretending to be 18 on their siblings ID at Reading Festival, I was working split shifts churning out high quality pub food. I still look back on that summer very fondly. I loved cooking and I loved being in the kitchen. Being surrounded by hard working people dedicated to their craft, I’ve never been in a situation like it. No matter how hard I work, my superiors where working harder.

A lot has changed since then, coffee shops cater to a different group of people. But I sell sub standard food, pretending to be home made and fresh, to the middle classes where image is everything. Its such a contradiction to the festival I was working at. I was working with an old colleague from the pub, a couple of times it felt like being 16 again. Everyone we where serving where people working at the festival, from the people who cleaned the toilets up to the headlining artists. The amazing thing was that there was no pretentiousness. Everyone who was there was grateful to be fed. They chatted with us, laughed at our jokes included us in conversation and thanked us for the food.

In the coffee shop I feel very much that I am there to serve. Theres a constant stream of questions and complaints. “My Coffees cold?”, “Why don’t you have coconut milk?”, “Clean my table.” Its soul destroying. Of course there are my favourite customers, one I can have a giggle with. But I am always there to serve.

I miss cooking. I didn’t realise until I went back to it. I wouldn’t want to go back to the intense lifestyle of being a professional chef. But I hate trying to sell shit food to people, pretending to pass it off as my own when all I did was defrost it in an oven.

Skiing can be a bit like this as well. In the instructor world its all about how well you can ski. Theres constant competition. I’m probably the worst for it. I refuse to be out-skied by cocky boys. There are also punters on the slopes with all their gear, very conscious of the image they’re putting out. It’s not fun. There was a point last season where I’d fallen out with skiing so much I considered giving it up all together.

I started skiing with snowboarders and park skiers. It was fun to be a bit of a jerry. I can just about land a 180 and even then its not pretty. But everyone in the park is just happy to have you there. You can watch someone nail a gnarly 540 cork, but he’ll get psyched over you not killing yourself on a dodgy box slide. Kids are the same, they just want to have fun. They don’t care about you being too far forward in your boots or wether you’re turning with the upper body, they want to know if they can ski through the trees and sing them stupid songs on the chair lift.

It really is true, that the best skier is the skier having fun.