Ski Instructors Report 1st December 2012

This is my first report of the season and the resort has been open for only one day (Dec. 1) It was very cold but bright sunshine and the snow cannons were going at full blast. The snow was great and there were very few people on the slopes, A really nice day. It seems a long time since my last report in April, so I started to think about Time. Instructors are paid by the hour, so there is no advantage charging up and down the mountain during a lesson descending so many vertical metres (or feet for those born before 1950). I believe that it is better to travel at a pace where the slowest client is within their comfort zone and at a speed that the more advanced skier can improve their skills. It is more important to give value for the lesson time. Now to take a deeper look at TIME; I can just about accept time without end (some chairlifts remind me of this).But time without beginning, is beyond my comprehension. Some religions believe that God created heaven and earth in six days and on the seventh, He went skiing. More secular persons believe that the big bang theory started the universe and so time would have started then. I often rewind a tape on my Betamax VCR. Some younger readers may have Sky plus or DVD’s where they can do the same. Now let us consider, what if there was a DVD of the creation of the universe, and we could rewind it for several zillion years, until the time of the big bang - this must have been very loud and you would have heard it for miles. But what if we rewound the tape for a few more frames, to before the time of the big bang, what would we see? Answers please, to the webmaster of whichever site you are reading this. Let us now consider, the past, present and future. Most modern languages use these three tenses. Let us assume that you are skiing down a slope. All the run that you have covered will of course is in the past. You want to make a turn; this will be in the future. But the moment that you initiate the turn that will already be in the past. The final phases of your turn will be in the future until you have completed them, then they too will be in the past. All this leads me to believe that the gap between past and future is so infinitely short that the present does not exist. Only our thoughts are in the future, any actions we make are immediately in the past. So, if mankind ceased to exist and there was no one to think about a future action, then the future would not exist. So the only tense in existence is the past. I recall a line from the theme tune of “Whatever happened to the likely lads?” From memory it was something like “the only thing that we have to look forward to, is the past.” Now back to skiing. If any of you are coming to visit us in Arinsal in the future, I hope that you have a really jolly TIME. .