I’ve just recently moved to Sweden to be with my Finnish girlfriend, Tanja. We’re living in Gothenburg on the west coast and oddly enough, other than Tanja, one of my best friends in Sweden is actually her ex-boyfriend, Nils. Even more strange is the fact I was supposed to be best man at their wedding, which should have happened just 8 months earlier, but things didn’t quite work out that way. Let me explain …..

I met Tanja and Nils backpacking in South America, Cuzco to be exact, just two years earlier. We travelled for a while through Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, became good friends and at the time I was asked to be witness at their engagement party in Ushuaia, on the southern tip of South America. A few months after that I came to visit them for a little trip around Sweden and Finland and then again a few months later in Greece together with a few of my mates from back home. Whilst in Greece, Nils asked me to be his best man at the wedding which was due to be just a few months after that. But just a few weeks later I got a phone call from Tanja to say it’s all been called off, she having received a call from a drunk female one night saying she’d been having an affair with Nils for many years behind her back. He eventually confessed whereby Tanja quite rightly kicked him out of their apartment and out of her life for good.

When the original wedding date came along Tanja just wanted to get away from Sweden. So she visited a friend of hers in Wales first before flying over to my little island to meet me and my friends. It wasn’t on either of our itineraries that anything would happen, even if we were both single and prone to the odd one-night-stand, but one thing led to another (strangely enough after a shed load of tequila one night ….) and before we knew it we had started a very long-distance, expensive dating phase between my island and Sweden.

After a few months it was obvious one of us had to move, so, convinced I’d be able to find a job easy enough in Gothenburg, I jumped on my motorbike and rode all the way up to Sweden.

I’ve only been living here a couple of months, if that, and whilst Nils may have been very upset with both me and Tanja in the beginning, he knows he’s only got himself to blame and incredibly we end up being pretty good friends under the circumstances.

So much so, that he’s invited me to join him and a few of his male friends on a skiing trip to Värmland. It’s March, and to be honest, I’m still adjusting to the winter temperatures of Sweden, often sinking to as low as -15 even on the coast of Gothenburg. But a ski trip sounds like fun and I’m always up for seeing new places and trying new things.

It’s not quite the first time I’ve skied, I had done it once before in Iceland. I’d been playing in a table tennis competition there and wanted to make the most of it by staying a few days extra after the competition had finished. One of the Icelandic national team members had offered to take me and my two male teammates skiing that time, none of us ever having skied before. Well, what a laugh that was. I mean, I spent the whole day falling over, but it was so funny watching your friends wiping out too. So I thought I’m bound to have as much fun this time too with Nils and his friends.

But that didn’t happen unfortunately.

First morning there we all make our way to the ski slopes and the first thing that hits me is that the slopes I’m looking at, even the nursery slope, are a lot steeper than the one I skied on in Iceland. They tried to calm my nerves by pointing out young kids coming down the hill, but I just looked up and had visions of both my legs in traction. So I sit there for a while and just stare up at the nursery slope while Nils and his friends, all accomplished skiers, go off to the proper ski slopes.

Sitting on one of the many big, chunky, wooden benches right at the bottom of the nursery slope, I’ve gone through about half a packet of cigarettes by the time they all come back with big smiles on their faces. One of the guys asks me if I’ve been up yet to which I confess I haven’t. All of them are trying to calm me down and tell me not to worry. Nils then points out a small kid coming down on a snowboard. He says, “Gary … look at this young kid coming down here. He must be 7 or 8 years old and look at him”.

To be fair, this kid did look pretty cool as he came flying down the hill. We all watched him as he started to approach us at the end of the slope. At this point I think we all started to think the same thing …. that this kid should be putting the brakes on around about now as he hurtled towards us at warp speed. But seemingly frozen solid he just flew towards us. It suddenly became clear that he was literally scared stiff and was not in control of his board at all. And by the time we all worked this out it was too late for us to intervene, he was coming straight at us, and travelling so fast he’d probably wipe us out if we tried to stop him. With no time to think what to do to help him, the poor kid piled into one of the huge wooden benches nearby at break-neck speed. He hit the bench with such a wallop, disappeared underneath ……. and then ….. total silence. Moments later a chilling scream came from below as we and a few other standers-by all raced towards him. The first man there pulled him out and lifted his goggles to squirts of blood pumping from his eye. Seconds later, I assume his father, appeared from nowhere and grabbed him.

I watched the commotion for the next half hour while various people administered first aid to the boy and tried to keep him calm until the helicopter medevac arrived and whisked him off to hospital.

Obviously I felt for the poor kid who may well have lost his eye that morning, but watching him smash his face open hadn’t exactly done anything to settle my nerves. Half a pack of cigarettes later the lads finally persuade me to make my way to the chair lift and before I knew it I was at the top …… looking down at those oh so big wooden benches at the bottom ….. with my name written all over them.

I think the lads maybe did a couple of runs with me before they all disappeared again for the steeper runs and once again left me to tumble all the way down the nursery slope on my own. It was a bit annoying to see kids barely up to my waste flying past with aplomb, but after a couple of hours or so I was starting to get the hang of the old snowplough thing and then all of a sudden I was starting to get my balance together as I jumped in the air to zigzag down the slope. I’ve got this now.

When the lads next came back I asked them to follow me up so I could show them my new moves, only to lose my balance on the very last turn and, with all my weight leaning back on the skis and screaming, pile helplessly into the queue waiting at the bottom of the ski-lift, taking out about 8 people all at once.

Next day they foolishly took me up to one of the faster runs where I literally fell on my ass the whole way down, getting more and more pissed off with every fall, and at that point I called it a day and instead decided to enjoy the beautiful white scenery and blue skies with a cold beer while they enjoyed the slopes.

All in all it was a nice weekend, but I did learn one valuable lesson. If you’re going to go skiing with friends, make sure you’re all the same standard. Falling over in the snow learning to ski is hilarious when you’re with your friends and you’re all doing it. Falling over on your own …. is just falling over. And that’s no fun.

I never did get a proper job in Sweden by the way. After two years of living there washing dishes and cleaning hotel rooms, I often wondered why having sent out probably a hundred job applications or more for various office work, that I’d never even got a single reply, never mind an interview or job offer. It wasn’t until I was about to move back to the Uk that I found out my computer had been using my joke email address I only use for my nutty friends, as the default, instead of my normal one. So, in hindsight, I’m not really surprised no-one responded to a CV sent in from bum_sausage@hotmail.com ………