BIG tur, little tur, big tur, little tur – you may have heard me intoning that mantra throughout last week.
There’s plenty of snur on the slurps, with more falling all the time. Hey hur, let’s gur!
Ruka is a scant thirty miles from the Russian border. From the top of the ski slopes you can see it, and you can ride out on a skidoo until you get to the line in the snur where Finland ends and Russia begins.
This was our second visit to the Finnish ski resort, a small and immensely welcoming village just 25 minutes by coach from the tiny aerodrome at Kuusamo, where the handful of charter flights bringing tourists are pretty much the only traffic.
At passport control they chat to you about your holiday plans and smile, instead of glowering out from their secure booths.
Ruka is growing, but while in a year or two it will be bigger and busier, there isn’t much prospect of it losing its charm.
When the weather warms up from the current minus 20, the roofs will go on a new apartment block beside the lake and Ruka will be ready to welcome even more people.
But the welcome hasn’t changed at Roy’s or at Koti Pizza or the Ski Bistro, where skiers in huge plastic boots clump in and out on the stone floors in search of sugary doughnuts and mugs of hot chocolate to accompany their tall tales of derring-do.
“Did you SEE that jump I just did half way down Red 12?”
Ruka is great, and if you have half a mind to try a Finnish skiing holiday, you should definitely give Ruka a go.
This year we decided to have lessons, in an effort to fine-tune the skills we have taught ourselves over the past few years.
Our instructor was a chap called Ashley, who was clearly not a Finn but had an accent we couldn’t place.
He gave us priceless hints about pushing down with the big tur on one foot and the little tur on the other.
This would help the edges of our skis cut into the snur as we made our way gracefully down the slurps.
My feet, it turned out, needed to be clurser together.
The accent beat us all, and Ashley had to divulge in the end that he was a native of Canberra, the proud capital of Australia.
He saves all his holidays for an annual trip to Finland, where he teaches buffoons like me to get down the mountain without hurting themselves.
My big tur routine helped me snowplough a little less, and by the end of the week I was almost proficient at parallel turns.
On the final day we stood at the top of the longest and steepest red slope in the resort – Red Ten, also known as Pessari.
In skiing, you start at green slopes, which are barely inclines at all, then move on to blue, then red and then maybe one day black, which is basically like throwing yourself down that hill at the back of Pimlico, on snow, on skis, with no practical means of stopping.
At the bottom of Red Ten is a bar called Monomesta.
Everyone says you should go there, because it sells delicious golden beer and baskets full of crispy chips drenched in spices and sauces.
All the cool kids go there to see and be seen in their best new kit, but there is no way of getting there without having first hurled yourself fearlessly down Red Ten.
Only Red Ten skiers get to dip their chips at Monomesta.
Thanks to the advice of the patient Australian I made it to the bottom in one piece.
I drank a beer and ate chips, posing in my budget salopettes as if I was the new Franz Klammer.
I’ll be ready for all eventualities if Paignton ends up getting any snur this winter.
Flim-Flam and Ballyhoo 