Wear ski helmets by all means, but Im sticking to a woolly hat

By Boris Johnson Published: 6:33AM GMT twenty-two February 2010

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Lions of the towering do not need tadpole-heads Photo: Getty

"Eh?" I said. I couldnt hold it. The train was circuitous up from Moutiers towards the ski resort, and one of the wives was giving me a marvellous square of news. It endangered the skiwear of dual old friends. If she had told me they were going to be wearing padded bras and cami‑knickers, I could not have been some-more astonished.

I mean, I have well known these people for decades. We have been skiing together for years, and I can attest that they are, in general, as dauntless as the subsequent man. When the light is vanishing and the last lift is about to close, they are the kind of chaps who come to the corner of a little straight mogul‑field and scream "Man or mouse!" prior to hurling themselves in to the icy void. When you are going up in a lift and you see underneath to see a integrate of lunatics negotiating the pure sleet of a little steep couloir, thats them.

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If you were cast of characters around for dual people who were still holding out opposite the elfin and reserve stupidity that is unconditional the culture, I would have forked you in their direction, and I would have proudly combined that they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions - until, as I say, one of their wives came up to me on the train and pennyless this unusual news. This year, she said, the men were going to be wearing helmets. "Helmets?" I said. "To go skiing? You meant helmets similar to kids wear?" Thats right, she said; and would I similar to to set a great e.g. by wearing one too?

I am fearful I did not feel equates to to accept her offer. In the march of a 35-year skiing career of relentless incompetence, I have been concerned in a little of the majority epic prangs ever witnessed. My falls have taken me from the tip of one black run to the commencement of the subsequent and onwards and downwards. I have postulated all demeanour of contusions. I have damaged a ride at Les Menuires and a rib at Courchevel. But never, in all the times when I have felt myself being catapulted head-first from my crossed skis, has it occurred to me to wear a childs steel sheet to go skiing.

Goggles, yes; a downy hat, yes; but a steel sheet not on your nelly. That was my message, delivered as kindly as I could. And nonetheless when we arrived at the pistes, my clarity of awe grew. Something uncanny has happened, and it has happened in the past integrate of years. It is as though the ski steel sheet has propagated itself similar to a little demoniac bacillus. Everywhere you see there are thousands of skiers young kids and adults comparison remade by their headgear in to shiny-bonced tadpoles. It wasnt my friends who looked odd, I realised: it was me.

Sometimes I would find myself on a chairlift sitting in a row of Darth Vaders, and I would bravery up the bravery to ask. Why the helmet? I murmured, and after a integrate of days I began to get a repair on the phenomenon. Of march it is partly fashion. Helmets are in this year in the approach that ruffs or codpieces or tip hats used to be in. They are treated with colour as a new must-have accessory, and majority of their success in the disproportion of Etienne the (helmetless) physical education instructor is down to "le marketing". You can get fur-lined helmets and helmets with stereo, and it all equates to great commercial operation for the ski-hire shops. But as roughly everybody said, the main reason was safety. It was about minimising risk, they said; and unexpected I realised I was seeking at a abounding and revealing painting of the human flock instinct.

Here in the Alps, as the helmets widespread from head to head, you can physically see the contamination of be scared as it passes from savage to beast, and you can see how differently essential people give approach to an undiscerning misjudging of risk. Has skiing unequivocally turn some-more dangerous in the past integrate of years, when people have proposed taking advantage of these lustrous black craniums? On the contrary, the solid alleviation of skis and bindings has done the competition safer than ever. Of march there was the unhappy box of Natasha Richardson, killed in a weird collision on the hothouse slopes. But afterwards there are regularly injuries, and if anything I suppose it competence be even some-more painful, if you are on the downhill side of the argument, to be walloped by an out-of-control skier versed with a cosmetic battering impel on his head.

No: there is something bizarre here, a turn in the Zeitgeist. I reckon the steel sheet insanity is some-more than only a subject of conform or a re-assessment of the healing risks of skiing. Its a pointer of the mental state of the Western highborn in the hold of an mercantile crisis. They have seen what happened to the risk-taking bankers; they have seen how the sky fell in on the lighthearted complement of free-market capitalism; and so they literally cover their heads as an countenance of the safety-first genius that has seized us all.

I do not contend they are wrong, any some-more than I contend my friends are wrong to wear helmets, and I prop myself for the indignant letters from those with head-injury stories of desired ones. Each of us contingency have his or her choice. But I ask you this: does James Bond wear a helmet, when he out-skis the baddie in On Her Majestys Secret Service? Look at those cinema of the plus-foured British pioneers of mountainous skiing, with their seven-foot skis and dementedly dangerous bindings. Did they wear helmets? Of march not.

Skiing is about the breeze in your hair and the object on your face as you privately report the contours of snow-covered plateau at unusual speed. It is the closest most of us come to flight. It is my common but low idea that it should engage the limit communion with nature, and that equates to no steel sheet for me. For the consequence of entire I should supplement that I did strike a tree the alternative day, but I strike it nose‑first. A steel sheet would have done no disproportion and you should have seen the tree.