Once more, you aficionados of the Alps, try to recall your first visit to this rooftop world: the sheer heart-busting beauty of the mountains, milk white, with their forests of dusted pines; the great fat flakes of fresh snow, viewed through your new persimmon-tinted goggles; even the sight of your first piste-basher, packing the surface into compact, orderly stripes.
He came full circle to the Royal Court, even before the current season, with their first "off-piste" season in Peckham in late 2011, playing a surly, hangdog shopkeeper on a Battersea housing estate in Rachel De-lahay's lively debut play, The Westbridge.
But several snowy destinations in Europe have a reputation for excellent cuisine that is almost as alluring as the first-rate pistes, from farmhouse cheeses in the Haute-Savoie in France to caviar and Champagne in Zermatt, Switzerland.
There's certainly plenty to take in around Cervinia, which opened its first slow-skiing piste last season.
Eskimo wannabes can opt to stay in a two- to six-person igloo for a night, with a near-guarantee that they will be the first on the piste in the morning.
He will cover two high, north-facing pistes first, building up a base layer that will help to prevent the natural snowfall from melting.
The Austrian clocked 1 minute, 16.71 seconds down a piste made up nearly entirely of artificial snow.
Though his best finish in five world championship downhills was second in 2009 in Val d'Isère, France, he trounced the field at the Hahnenkamm downhill in Kitzbühel on Jan . 22 taming the notoriously treacherous Streif piste 98-hundredths of a second faster than Miller, the runner-up.
It was a far cry from the Rominger who had slid so ungracefully down the banking on his first moments on the piste, unable to keep himself upright through sheer lack of momentum.
I'm one of those skiiers who likes to be on the first lift up the piste in the morning.
