Ski Ischgl by Arnie Wilson

Note to self: always bring own skis, even when early-season conditions (i.e. no snow) could mean wrecking them. The Austrians have finally followed the Americans into computerised rentals, which means entering your vital statistics (including country of origin) into a computer. But will said electronic device allow you to choose the correct country? And does it matter? During an early season visit to the party-town of Ischgl, in Tyrol's Paznaun valley, one of my skiing companions got so fed up with trying unsuccessfully to register his British birthright and repeatedly having to start the process again each time he failed, that in the end he settled for the Lesser Islands of the USA as his homeland. Me? I ended up as a Saudi Arabian citizen.

One must not be too hard on such ski shops. Like the rest of us, they are slaves to modern technology, and at least my rented skis had good enough edges to have been able to grip sand from Rub' Al Khali (the Empty Quarter) had that been required.

Bearing in mind that much of the Alps in early December was struggling, to put it mildly, for snow, Ischgl turned out to be remarkably well-endowed - just like the rather tacky American group the Pussycat Dolls who launched a new winter with a concert at the bottom of the gleaming Silvrettabahn gondola. (Personally I found the go-go dancers at the slopeside Hotel Elisabeth bar much more discreet and easy on the eye.) So while the neighbouring resort of St Anton, the shop window of Austrian skiing, and its stablemates Lech and Zürs were unable to open in early December, Ischgl was thriving. As sometimes happens during dud early Decembers, what snow there was had come in from the south, giving Ischgl a distinct advantage over its more famous neighbours. Much of Ischgl's skiing flows across the Swiss border into Samnaun, and visitors were able to ski at will deep into Swiss territory too.

Among our party was the former British World Cup downhill skier Konrad Bartelski (still the only British male to have climbed onto a World Cup rostrum when he famously came second in Val Gardena in 1981) and the TV chef Heston Blumenthal, the "culinary alchemist"