Nose, grindstone. Grindstone, nose.

I'm back at work.

You'd think that 24 hours travelling spread over 3 days would engender some long, thoroughly philosophical inner debate about something important. The western world's preoccupation with pursuit of money as opposed to actual happiness perhaps; the themes of wartime responsibility and reconciliation suggested in An Artist Of The Floating World maybe, or simply a re-evaluation of my goals in life after a fortnight spent among snow-capped alpine peaks.

But no. Mainly I was squinting through the gaps between the seats on whatever mode of transport - airliner, bus, or train - in which I was then ensconced to see if the girl over there really was hot.

I'm sitting in an internet café in Waverley station, waiting for a train that doesn't leave for another two hours. The webcam saga took a final twist the very day before I left for France, necessitating a trip down south to make some last minute alterations to the setup.

I had written a vast, rambling, Moby Dick-sized indictment of the whole bastarding process. I then deleted it, because the red mist died down and I could, in the cold light of day, see that it was self-pitying crap.

So, instead: week 2 of boarding. I was getting frustrated with my Donek Incline towards the end of the first week - it holds a line like it's on rails but the stiffness that lets it do this is incredibly tiring to use, and makes it a handful at low speeds. After a morning looking around board shops, endlessly asking questions subconsciously intended to delay the spending of a big wedge of cash, I settled on a Ride Mickey LeBlanc Pro 156. Endless names and marketing wank aside, it was a much softer, wider freestyle board that I couldn't wait to try out. Unfortunately, I found myself with a metre-and-a-half long, sail-like plank of wood to get down, somehow, a hundred and fifty metres into a different valley.

That was an interesting journey, I can tell you.

I got down in one piece and lo! the board was great. That very day, it started snowing and then just kept snowing for the rest of the week. Off-piste areas were covered in successively deeper and deeper powder and the board was absolutely right for it; where the Donek would nose-dive and fail to turn, the Ride floated over it all and was a much more forgiving to use. It all culminated in possibly the best day's boarding I've ever had, with the Thursday afternoon entirely consisting of tree-dodging, flat-out charges down powdery off-piste steeps and caning along perfectly groomed runs.

At that was basically it; add in five nights consumption of beer, ham and cheese, and you have week 2. I'm left feeling not a little flat after an 8-hour, 4 am journey home and the prospect of going back to work. Ho hum. With any luck, I'll do something A) interesting and B) non-boarding-related soon, else this little diary will descend into even more mindless tedium that it has henceforth plumbed...!

Technically speaking, I didn't actually need this, but my word: it is a top board. Plus we've had loads of snow over the past week, in stark contrast to the previous one, so the bigger board is a damn sight better in the powdery stuff.

Speaking of which: I'm off to practise riding switch some more. You can look forward to a more rambling and incoherent post about week 2 on my triumphant return to the 'burgh.

Suited, booted and duck-footed*:

bienvenue a l'Arc 1800. I've managed to find a pub with internet access (the genius of this pairing has only now struck me), after being told in the last place (a laundry) that they don't have access at the weekends. From Monday only, apparently.

Strange.

Anyway, we're here, and have been for a week. The weather is almost exactly as it was last year: sunny to a fault. It's warm enough during the day to melt the top layers of the snow into a slushy mess, then cold enough at night to re-freeze it into a treacherous crust. My (short and inflexible) board is happiest on groomed pistes with nicer snow, so it's a bit of a challenge to adapt to slipping and sliding around on hard-packed ice and then barrelling into a sticky, choppy, slow patch of crud. Still, I seem to be doing reasonably well. I had my first real lesson yesterday - last year, the instructor for my solitary previous lesson turned up 45 minutes late and then had to leave early - and I really enjoyed it. This year the instructor, having established that I'd never done any serious off-piste stuff, nor visited the park or tried riding switch, made sure that I A) did some rather steep off-piste B) rode switch for a while, and C) tried a route through the park.

Turns out A) steep off-piste in icy, crusty semi-powder is astonishingly difficult; B) switch is easy, and C) jumps (small ones, anyway) are also easy. I declined the offer to try a rail slide or a 180. I value my health.

It's difficult to stay on the slopes as much as I'd want...running and cycling are good for general stamina, but the muscles used for boarding would appear to be long-forgotten, vestigial ones last used by our aquatic ancestors. My right calf and left quad are permanently aching, so I think today, when we move to a different apartment, may be a day off. We also seem to be embedded within a cloud layer and the whole place is enveloped in a misty rain.

Anyway, I've slipped into that lack-of-responsibility mode that comes with being forcibly removed from contact with home by dint of huge mobile phone costs and expensive internet access, and I'm having trouble writing anything other than a sort of monotone recollection of day upon day of blissful boarding, so I'll be off.

A plus tard! (My French sparkles like a linguistic gem, n'est-ce pas?)

* Okay, okay, another contrived title: suited because I'm clad in full-on boarding kit, booted because I'm wearing my bad-ass Salomon F's and duck-footed because the instructor that took my lesson yesterday was of the opinion that my binding angles (rotated in opposite directions, hence duck-footed) are the right way to go. I'm sorry. Really I am.

Remember the webcam stuff I've been whingeing about? Well, it's finished. I've twice tried to write semi-reasonable posts about the rigmarole I went through to finish this project but the first turned into a hugely long essay that just begged to be read in a monotone, and the second was more or less swear words the whole way though.

So instead you get some semi-breezy geek waffle about feeling like I've just got out of jail.

Basically, I had to get two Nikon cameras talking to a PC. Turned out this was completely impossible.

Next, I tried using a Logitech webcam instead. This sort of worked. Ish. The last month has been spent cajoling the little bastard into doing what I want. Lessons learned?

1. Logitech webcams have stupendously, staggeringly bad image quality.
   
2. Logitech can't write TWAIN drivers for shit.
   

TWAIN is geeky. Ignore it. The image quality thing is actually quite bad, though. For the £90 Ruth spent on a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000, she could have bought a 'real' digital camera with megapixel resolution that would have produced at least passable images. As it is, the Logitech camera provides grainy, pixelated 640x480 images. I suspect they spent more money coming up with the name than the technology...

In the end though, it all works: my two eyeball-esque webcams are now happily providing scrappy images with dubious colour palettes to the slideshow program I wrote, and I can now go off to France with a clear conscience. Barring any giddily exciting events between now and Friday, the next entry here will probably either from a French internet café or a French hospital. One of the two.

Le weekend:

• Friday: beat a girl at arm-wrestling. Thrown to the floor by said girl. In the pub. Shouted a lot about how good Teenage Fanclub are in comparison to Tom Waits. Shouted some more. Went to bed.
  
• Saturday: woke up with colossal hangover. Programmed (see webcam entry) all day, with reasonable success. Made tea. Drank tea. Watched Four Feathers. Wished I hadn't watched Four Feathers. Went to bed.
  
• Sunday: built a PC on which to run said webcam program, with reasonable success. Made tea. Drank tea. Programmed some more. Watched The O.C. (excuse: first episode is directed by Doug Liman. Verdict: fried gold. Utter fried gold). Programmed some fucking more. Went to bed.
  

Rock and roll, my friends. Rock and roll.

"And then a hell-beast ate them."

I got a taxi back from Ruth's birthday night out on Monday. The driver turned round and said: "Where to, friend?"

I can only assume he'll be as sad as I was to see the last episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace last night.

I woke up at 11 am on Saturday.

"Christ!" I thought, "I'm going to be late for work". Then I realised there is no work on Saturday.

I woke up yesterday at 4 pm. "4 pm? Shit. I've missed work". I stumbled out of bed, thinking "No time for a shower!", got dressed and opened the curtains to reveal complete darkness. I went back to bed and got up five hours later, at 9 am.

What, exactly, is going on with my sleeping patterns?

I was most disappointed that the bouncer on Friday night failed to see the parallels between the GCHQ whistleblower case and letting me into a bar after they'd called last orders. I mean, it's minor illegallity (pff) versus moral correctness, isn't it? Taking a stand again the Man's rules and doing what's demanded by common decency. Right?

Somebody back me up here.

The night started off with a meal in Nargile with Dave, Michelle, Lee (Dave's flatmate), Kate and Laura, a friend of hers. Cue rapid consumption of wine and kebabs, and excellent chat: fried gold it was, fried gold. After the meal, Kate and Laura headed off and the rest of us took to the Café Royal. About this time I got a couple of text messages - first from Devon and then Annabel:

• Devon: "Siglo, baby. SIGLO. There is POLE DANCING"
  
• Annabel: "Hurry the fuck up. I hate this place."
  

Siglo is a truly awful neon-lit ned-magnet. I promised I'd be round in twenty minutes, and then spent the next hour failing to leave the Café Royal and by the time I got there, they'd closed the bar. See above for details. So, once everyone had drunk up and come out to meet me, we had a few more drinks over some table football and then came home. All in all, a good night and not, for a change, an overly fermented one.

I spent most of Saturday trying to make my PC talk to a Logitech webcam (all in the name of art. I'll explain once I actually get it to work) with frustratingly little success. Still, the evening was nicely sedate: Neil had come over that afternoon, and he, Jeff and I had a few quiet pints in the Maltings.

Sunday was split in equal measures between fun (a drive out to Gullane with Kate for a walk along the beach, a pub lunch and an irresponsible hoon back to Edinburgh), irritation (more webcam problems) and incredulity (the first couple of hours of the Oscars).

And now, dear diary, to work. Or at least searching the web for Logitech webcam FAQs.