Gstaad

Gstaad decided a long time ago what it wanted to be, and then it simply refused to change. There are no high-rises, by law: the whole village is chalet, dark wood and low eaves, strung along a car-light promenade in the Bernese Oberland. The Palace watches from its hill. The skiing is sunny and unhurried, spread across gentle sectors that run up to the glacier at three thousand metres, and the people who come here have long since stopped needing the hard stuff.

We fly here because Gstaad is the rarest thing in the Alps. Because the best kind of ski weekend is the one where the skiing is almost beside the point, and the point is a long lunch, a longer walk, and nobody keeping score.