IT is not just with bat and ball that KJ has failed to impress as a sportsman.
A day after my return from the beautiful ski resort of Megeve, France, I can report I'm as equally inept on Alpine pistes as I am on the greener, occasionally flatter venues of home.
Actually, I do myself an injustice. After four years of skiing holidays, I'm not too terrible. I'm still more Stanley Baxter than Alain Baxter but drop me at the top of almost any slope and I'll muddle my way down.
Lack of bottle holds me back. Technically, I can be the bees knees. Indeed, my short-radius turns were the talk of the town. But while the rest of my ski gang point down the hill and gracefully carve their way to a waiting vin chaud, yours truly zig-zags out of the clouds with eyes like saucers and thigh muscles burning like hot coals.
So it was with utter surprise and a sense of foreboding that I heard myself sign up to a potentially humiliating and life-threatening experience:
I entered a genuine, competitive, gongs-for-the-winners giant slalom race! And I even had to shell out ten of your johnny foreigner bank notes for the privilege.
The omens were not good. My only previous attempt at getting up a proper head of steam on skis cost me an eye lid and my original facial bone structure. I can testify to the stunning stopping ability of a noggin buried into the side of a mountain which sneaks up on you at 60mph.
As it happened, speed was not my enemy in the slalom race. Far from it. For an indication of my performance and prowess, it did not go unremarked in the hotel afterwards that the official race photographer captured three pin-sharp pictures of me - and single, dramatic blurred shots of everyone else!
I didn't help that to even get to the start gate - that's right kids, a start gate (plus race bibs and proper electronic timing when I was expecting only a frog with a big flag at the top and his mate with a stopwatch at the bottom) - I had to negotiate the steepest, scratchiest run in the entire Alps and then ski a treacherous route through a haunted forest past the frozen bones of long-dead English adventurers.
Maybe I'm bending the verite a tad, but it was certainly no preparation for an all-out assault on the fiendishly fiendish giant slalom course that stretched away fiendishly below me.
All too soon I was no longer louche English tourist Jacko, I was suddenly competitor No 29 with a weak bladder, slack bowels and visions of a life spent eating through a straw next to big machine that goes 'ping'.
I got off to a flier. The first three gates whizzed past in a stylish swish of parallel excellence. The next few were slightly more ragged but commendable. Then, disaster! The after-burners cut-out! I was in a Top Gun-style icy tail spin and had to dig deep to remember the procedure - and deployed the emergency snow-plough!
I crossed the finish line, just, with help of ski poles, to polite rather than excited applause. The timer consulted his calendar . . . 1 min 41.2 seconds. Not bad at all thinks KJ, coolly falling over in the snow trying to remove the bib.
Not bad. But still dead last! And not by fractions of a second. Last by more than 20 seconds! 40th out of 40! The winning time was a shade under 37 seconds.
I'm not expecting a call-up to Team GB for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver - but at least I can now call myself a "competitive skier."
*I have been asked to point out that Mrs J also took part in the race. She took 1 min 09 sec. But you have to remember the ladies' course was, um, the same one.
A day after my return from the beautiful ski resort of Megeve, France, I can report I'm as equally inept on Alpine pistes as I am on the greener, occasionally flatter venues of home.
Actually, I do myself an injustice. After four years of skiing holidays, I'm not too terrible. I'm still more Stanley Baxter than Alain Baxter but drop me at the top of almost any slope and I'll muddle my way down.
Lack of bottle holds me back. Technically, I can be the bees knees. Indeed, my short-radius turns were the talk of the town. But while the rest of my ski gang point down the hill and gracefully carve their way to a waiting vin chaud, yours truly zig-zags out of the clouds with eyes like saucers and thigh muscles burning like hot coals.
So it was with utter surprise and a sense of foreboding that I heard myself sign up to a potentially humiliating and life-threatening experience:
I entered a genuine, competitive, gongs-for-the-winners giant slalom race! And I even had to shell out ten of your johnny foreigner bank notes for the privilege.
The omens were not good. My only previous attempt at getting up a proper head of steam on skis cost me an eye lid and my original facial bone structure. I can testify to the stunning stopping ability of a noggin buried into the side of a mountain which sneaks up on you at 60mph.
As it happened, speed was not my enemy in the slalom race. Far from it. For an indication of my performance and prowess, it did not go unremarked in the hotel afterwards that the official race photographer captured three pin-sharp pictures of me - and single, dramatic blurred shots of everyone else!
I didn't help that to even get to the start gate - that's right kids, a start gate (plus race bibs and proper electronic timing when I was expecting only a frog with a big flag at the top and his mate with a stopwatch at the bottom) - I had to negotiate the steepest, scratchiest run in the entire Alps and then ski a treacherous route through a haunted forest past the frozen bones of long-dead English adventurers.
Maybe I'm bending the verite a tad, but it was certainly no preparation for an all-out assault on the fiendishly fiendish giant slalom course that stretched away fiendishly below me.
All too soon I was no longer louche English tourist Jacko, I was suddenly competitor No 29 with a weak bladder, slack bowels and visions of a life spent eating through a straw next to big machine that goes 'ping'.
I got off to a flier. The first three gates whizzed past in a stylish swish of parallel excellence. The next few were slightly more ragged but commendable. Then, disaster! The after-burners cut-out! I was in a Top Gun-style icy tail spin and had to dig deep to remember the procedure - and deployed the emergency snow-plough!
I crossed the finish line, just, with help of ski poles, to polite rather than excited applause. The timer consulted his calendar . . . 1 min 41.2 seconds. Not bad at all thinks KJ, coolly falling over in the snow trying to remove the bib.
Not bad. But still dead last! And not by fractions of a second. Last by more than 20 seconds! 40th out of 40! The winning time was a shade under 37 seconds.
I'm not expecting a call-up to Team GB for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver - but at least I can now call myself a "competitive skier."
*I have been asked to point out that Mrs J also took part in the race. She took 1 min 09 sec. But you have to remember the ladies' course was, um, the same one.
