No business like snow business

Tommy Barker slipped and sloped back into skiing after 30 years away, with some chalet highlife in spectacular Meribel.

EVEN the staff working for Irish chalet ski company Highlife, in their Three Valleys French resort, seem to have a bit of an edge.

On a very mixed-ability group ski-trip last March their hard-working crew, at a cluster of timber chalets in Alpine village Meribel, included a hard-working, tall and tanned young Dublin woman with a winter-weather eye out. It was none other than Olympic sailor Annelise Murphy, managing to work and stay fit at the same time in the off-season run-up to her heroic London Games performances.