I have had a few Klauses in my time. First there was Kitzbühel Klaus, whom I met, aged 17, on a family skiing holiday. He seemed the epitome of cool: rocking up to ski school unshaven and bleary-eyed, using every chairlift ride to light up a Marlboro Red and flirting appallingly with anything in an all-in-one ski suit.
Then there was German Klaus: a blond snowboarding instructor who couldn’t pass my boyfriend (whom he was teaching) without pouring schnapps down his throat and slapping him so hard on the back that he nearly coughed it straight back up again.
More recently there was Krazy Klaus (self-named), who took my nervousness as a personal challenge and seemed hell-bent on taking me on a schnapps-fuelled whizz down a black run.
At one stage I even started to believe I could do it (I fell asleep on my bar stool not long after). As the days passed I don’t know what I feared destroying more — my spine or my liver.
Every ski resort has a Klaus. These boys are just having too much of a good time; flirting with female instructors in the lift queue; hopping over the barrier (with skis still on) for a josh with the lift operator; a brief interlude for some actual instruction; and then off for a beer’n’fag lunch to tide them over till après-ski.
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Klaus comes unshaven, with tousled hair but astonishingly white teeth. At first you kid yourself that underneath the swagger your safety is truly his primary concern. It’s only when he fails to come and sign your leg plaster, as you languish in the infirmary, that you realise he didn’t really love you after all . . .