Less partying, more skiing: How to have a ‘grown-up’ ski season in your 40s

I came to skiing late – I had hit 40 and was trying to find a family holiday that everyone was keen to go on. It worked – what could be better than a week of fresh air atop a beautiful French mountain? There was snow galore, plenty of adrenaline-fuelled fun and a mindboggling quantity of hot chocolate (plus vin chaud for the adults).

Ever since that first family ski holiday, I had often thought about how much fun a ski season would have been in a gap year or just after university. You know the kind of thing: living in the Alps from December to April and working in a bar or a chalet, skiing or snowboarding in your time off, hitting the bars until the small hours and existing on ludicrously little sleep.

Of course, Brexit means that even if I still had the energy to ski and do a full-time job cleaning loos and changing beds, the chances of getting a work permit would be vanishingly small. The specific rules around it vary between countries, but in France you need a job offer and for the employer to have advertised it to EU-qualified people for a time before turning to outside help. The Brexit reality for UK youngsters is that there are plenty of young people from mainland Europe, Ireland (as well as Aussies, who have a reciprocal working holiday agreement) to fill up the seasonal ski jobs without employers needing to deal with the bureaucracy of hiring someone from the UK.

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My chances of ever going on a ski season were, I thought, doomed. Until that is, I discovered the Ski Club of Great Britain’s rep scheme – a different, more concentrated way of doing a season for people who are in it mainly for the skiing rather than the partying. They have reps in Europe and North America, and have recently reintroduced them into a selection of French resorts after being absent for almost a decade.

Read more: The best ski resorts in Italy

Could this be my way into a ski season, a chance to ski for a month or more instead of a week on school holidays? I headed to Tignes in the French Alps to try my hand at being a rep in the company of Mark Brailey, who has been repping for the past four years in Austria, Switzerland and now France.

Mark, 63, lives in Bristol and owns a web marketing company. A laptop and a good broadband…