Kirsty Gunn: Skiing is a metaphor for our Scotland's ups and downs

Skiing in the Highlands is different, but theres nothing quite like it in the best possible ways. Picture: Getty

Yet the patches of blood in the snow? Those kids in tears begging to be taken home because they’re frightened of the speed of their snowboards? The lumps of peaty hill that you hit coming over the tops where you thought there would be more snow? Arghhh…it’s nothing.

All part of the gorgeous scariness and unpredictability of the weather and conditions that is skiing in the Highlands – an experience that might be a kind of metaphor of the way we think about ourselves as a nation. Up and down. Down and up. It’s there – the triumph and disappointments, the stoicism and hopefulness that my husband marks as part of the ambience, the vocabulary of our sensibility, in so much of what we do, how we are. At once practical and self-doubting, confident and also quick to fall back. Full of love for country, but sort of self-hating about that love, too.

“Skiing in the Highlands?” people keep saying to me. “Why on earth do you want to do that?” Well, the answer is – paraphrasing Burns – that there is nothing like it, and it’s by far more fun than skiing anywhere else. The unpredictability of the whole venture, the difficulties and the worry that’s entailed, the sort of low level buzz of alarm when one senses all about oneself the perilous uncertainties of the amateur, a particular sort of amateur atmosphere, I mean, where beginners are unmarshalled in the way the beginner might be marshalled in other ski resorts abroad, where fun and contingency defy professionalised order and control…

All these facts and more slide over and obliterate the easy and sophisticated smoothnesses of skiing in Europe or the New World. Highland skiing is just…awkward. And that makes it the best.

It’s tricky weather for a start, of course. Either you’re being snowed in on the Tomintoul road and can’t get on to the fields at The Lecht, or gales have blown you off at Aviemore and now everything’s closed. Or there’s been a sudden temperature rise overnight and the snow has all disappeared, or it’s perfect up there at Glencoe but you’d never have guessed it, and didn’t, and so instead never got there and you’re stuck at home instead, thinking about how much you’re missing.

So yes, awkward. It is, and terrifying, to be out and about in unpredictable weather, doing unpredictable things on a pair of skis because you want to make the most of your time, surrounded by unimaginably enthusiastic people who all feel the same way and so are being equally unpredictable.

Certainly, there’s little in the way of your Swiss and Austrian professionalism here, with associated military-style queue systems and orderly lines of hot chocolate. And little by way of apres ski and designer gear and kit and the rest of it. But, oh, oh, oh there is charm and friendliness and everyone having wonderful manners! And oh, too, is there gorgeous skiing to be had when it all comes together, and great conversations on the chairlift with strangers about politics and land and culture…

And then down you go, skiing over snow and peat and grass on your way down to an inferior bag of chips never feeling so fabulous, never feeling so strongly how wonderful Scotland is.

Is it a time thing that makes me want Aviemore and not Chamonix? That there’s something about skiing in Scotland that goes back to an earlier age when we were a bit more upbeat about ourselves? Not so pressured into being positive, I mean, by marketing campaigns and ideology, but feeling naturally at home with the country, cheery about it, in our bones?

My Granny used to talk about it – the jolliness of being on the train up to Thurso from Inverness and all the skiers boarding at Kingussie and Aviemore with their woolly jumpers and pompom hats… Certainly the mood now as it was then is upbeat in that manner; if not throughout the kingdom, we’re upbeat on the ski runs of Highland Scotland.

Energetic, interested and collegial is what it is. Skiers and snowboarders commend each other and give tips and advice. The guys operating the chairlift slow it down when there are children disembarking so that they don’t tumble off the end to a round of cruel laughter and derision such as I’ve seen elsewhere.

And if someone jams their poles in the T-bar starting off, no one sighs or berates. People stop if you fall. Ask if they can help. They help look for your hat when you’ve lost it. Give you 50p for the chocolate machine. And if this all sounds too Disneyland to be true, then it’s just because you’ve not skied in the Highlands yourself, because you think it’s beneath you and you only want to go to the Alps.

Self-hating, you see? Because it’s extraordinary up there. Even this half term when we’re worried that there’ll be no snow at all. Still, all phones are trained to Heather at Ski Scotland and the e-mails that come pinging in to let us know what’s open where and when.

I am sorry indeed to have missed the opening of the Angela Catlin show of photographs “Natural Light 11” at the Lillie Art Gallery in Glasgow on Friday, but there’s time to get along in the next few weeks to see her stunning series of portraits, all arranged with her photo journalist’s eye for drama and a story.

Angela and I talked about skiing in the Highlands when we first met, a couple of summers ago. We talked about the wonders of the Scottish landscape and the beauty of the hills, how you can see everything when you’re up on the tops. She and I talked about wind turbines and industrial-scale fish farming, too, and all the other ways that same landscape is under threat, a way of life with it.

I’ll get to her show, for sure, as soon as I come down from up here, where, just for now, I don’t have to think about all those other very real terrors that are closing in on a part of the world we used to talk about with affection and love. Where I can believe, just for the present, that it’s timeless, this land of ours, bigger than all of us, our petty politics, where I can be more up than down.