Some love her, others would like to run away from her, others live off her. We are, of course, talking about the cold, mind you, the winter cold, preferably to be enjoyed outside and not in underheated offices or homes.
What could be nicer than stepping out of the door on a freezing cold, sunny winter day, feeling the icy air in your nose, seeing the glistening snow, with the prospect of skiing, ice skating or simply going for a walk that day ?
Yes, flying to Tenerife or Zanzibar will say the notorious winter grouches who prefer to stew in their own juice at 30 degrees and 95 percent humidity. If they like, each as he likes.
Only the friends of winter and the cold have been treated badly in recent years. We remember: Team Caution (now: Team Laissez-faire) considered skiing in the fresh air and border crossings to Austria to be so harmful to public health that both were summarily made impossible.
Now that the pandemic has lost its terror and is possibly drawing to a close, everything would have actually spoken for untroubled fun in the snow and ice and cold. Especially when it’s already cold before Christmas this time and everything is white.
But we winter friends didn’t reckon with Father Frost, who, as is well known, comes from Russia, but this time in the form of an ugly face and not a dear, bulbous-nosed grandfather. Energy is expensive, so skiing will be even more expensive than it already was.
Anyone who still wants and can afford it from time to time must – great general lamentation! – Expect the buttocks heating on the chairlift to be switched off and the ride to be a little slower. Bah! What would we winter lovers have done in the past, one would like to call out to the younger ones, when the chairlift ride in childhood took a whopping 20 minutes at minus twelve degrees? The elevator man gave you an old gray military blanket and threw it over your head like a tent.
No, that won’t stop the winter people from having fun. Adversity threatens in addition to the high ticket prices from a completely different side. The chairman of the Bavarian Nature Conservation Union recently called for the ski resort operators to leave the energy-intensive snow-making systems switched off this winter out of “solidarity” because of the energy crisis.
Hm. Apart from who the ski resort operators should show solidarity with; and also about the fact that you can, of course, have to, criticize the whole circus – the suggestion is a bit like saying to a dairy farmer: Stop milking the cows, because that uses up too much energy.
And so the operators will laugh a little outraged, fire up their guns and be happy about the current cold weather, which their business model makes possible in the first place.
Hans Gasser is happy about the cold. He doesn’t find piste skiing reprehensible, but he does find the megalomania in the industry.
(Photo: Bernd Schifferdecker (Illustration))