On why there isn't snowboarding all year round There's an awful lot of moaning going on about how long we have to wait until the next season. But let's get some perspective here. There's a lot wrong with snowboarding, and really, we wouldn't be able to stand a whole year of it.

Probably.

Snowboarding is a physically demanding sport. Also it involves a fair bit of risk. From hitting trees to catastrophic head plants, much can go wrong. And often it does, although not always spectacularly. The week of your first day out in the season sees you hobbling about massaging your knees and clutching at your aching bum cheeks. You sit down very slowly each time, and say, "Ow!" when you stand up. Any subsequent week after a trip following a short hiatus will be full of the same sort of pain. If we could snowboard all year round, our knees wouldn't work properly, and we'd walk about in the snowboarding posture all the time, that is to say, like apes.

I had two good injuries last season. The first involved some unintended and most unwelcome 'air', caught under a chairlift off a sudden drop I didn't see. The front tip of my board landed first, burying itself into the snow and slamming me forwards with all my weight moving around my front ankle. I thought I had broken it until I realized it didn't hurt quite that much. In the van on the way home, I massaged it like crazy with much loud groaning until instructed to be quiet, but the ankle still seized up. It stayed that way for nearly two weeks after.

The other injury was pathetic really. Coming to a stop at the lift barrier, I slipped and twisted my shoulders awkwardly. It felt as though I had been shot in the back with a crossbow. No amount of stretching and twisting on the lift and in the onsen later would make the pain go away completely. The whole of the last season was marked by a constant clutching at my shoulder and grimacing. That sort of thing doesn't go unnoticed by one's bucho, who takes an annoying and wholly unsympathetic interest in the details. Try putting up with all of that palaver for a whole year.

Snowboarding pals, your 'Chinas', can be a problem too. On the Joetsu highway, there's a daft one-lane bridge that slows the traffic down, then a long tunnel beyond which the Snow Country starts in earnest. Just like in the novel, you come out of the tunnel, but there's a shocked silence in the van. You can actually see the road under the car in front. One of your mates says, "Christ, I've never seen it like this...This is...this is shit. It's not going to be any good at all. It's not too late to turn back. Shall we just have a half-day, because this is like...awful. Like normally, you can't see the houses or trees...Jesus." And on and on.

They're all right though, your mates. But you wouldn't want to have the same debate for 52 weekends about whether you're going to climb up to the tower, drop off the left side and cross over the Skyline into Avalanche Gulch, or just head straight down to Looney Valley. No indeed. It's enough that you have that debate ten or twenty times a year.

Your mates can be quite insistent in getting you to go places you really shouldn't think about going. They say, "Oh come on. Look, it may be steep, but with all that pow on it, it won't even hurt if you fall over. It's safe. We wouldn't ask you go anywhere you'd get hurt. Seriously." So we head for Chutie Boy, the steep and narrow chute that marks the remains of a defunct lift. It looks terrifying, and as we head for the brink, our boards are making some very nasty scraping noises on what appears not to be deep fluffy powder. There's a bit of reappraisal going on, and some jockeying not to be the one to score first tracks this time. Finally the Turdle is nominated. He makes a few tentative turns in the limited space. Then with a shout of "Cor, fucking hell!" he disappears completely down a huge grassy crack that has opened in the famed Chutie Boy. With much loud recrimination, the Turdle hauls himself out of the crack and back up to where his mates are having a very concerned chuckle, and where at least one of them is making a little memo to himself not to listen to any further matey invitations. "How were we to know there was a big crack there? We couldn't see it."

No, it's best that there are other seasons so you that you can take a break from snowboarding with hazardous friends, and go and do safer summer activities. Like bridge-jumping.

I didn't realize I could come to hate a newscaster so intensely for saying the weather in the wrong way. For example, the local newsman might note that tomorrow won't get colder than 2 degrees. He smiles, and says, "That's a good deal higher than the annual average". And I would call him names that really aren't fair at all, and offer to disembowel him right there in the studio in Nagano. My family would look at me rebelliously when I yelled at them to be utterly silent when the forecast came on. "Don't you think you're taking this a little bit far?" they would say noisily and unfeelingly.

That does it. You're dead.

I would check the weather sites on the Internet every 15 minutes, knowing full well that they only change twice a day. I'd look at Shiga, sigh, and then go and look at Nozawa's snowfall, sigh again more deeply, and check out Hakuba. Not good. A year of that would drive a man completely nuts.

I usually wear glasses, but goggles and glasses don't go well together, in spite of what goggle makers would have you believe. If you get condensation, and a sweaty bugger like myself does, you get two layers of it, which makes seeing out very difficult. If you do a face plant, the goggles scrunch onto one's beautiful features, pushing the nose clip of your glasses right into your cheeks. Ow!

So I got 1-day contact lenses, but the first day putting them in was hell. I had got up at 4:30 instead of the usual 5:00 to give myself time to do the brutal deed. I touched my eyeball more times that morning than I've touched my eyeball ever before, even on aggregate. I poked at my eye, I cried out, I clenched my teeth and poked it again. I said very bad things that would upset my mother. My eye went red and weepy and I poked it some more. I dropped the damn contact lense maybe twenty times. By the time I got the thing to stick, it was covered in fibres from my fleece, and very ticklish. But I wasn't going to go taking it off, washing it, and not getting it back in again for another thirty minutes. And that was just the first eye. That eye had told the other eye about what to expect, and it was now clenched tightly shut and not going to cooperate at all. I thought of the Suwa boys sitting in the van waiting for me, saying very bad things that would upset my mother, and me too probably, and I pried the offending eye open completely so the eyeball almost fell out into my hand...and...stuck...the...lense...on. Back to front as it turned out.

After about the eighth trip, I was getting fairly good at putting them in. Generally, it took less than five minutes. But Nature did not intend us to get about with little plastic skins over our eyeballs. And Nature lets us know this by sending signals to the eye to play up. It blinks its real skin over the plastic skin until both are completely dry. Then it makes the real skin grip the plastic skin and pull it off the eyeball, folding it neatly in half in the process. Nature says to the eyeball "You're suffocating, you can't breath, he's trying to kill you, you...just...need...some...AIR!" All this business between Nature and the eyeball is going on while you're trying to stay on an icy highway at 120 kph, or you're thinking about not falling off the very steep sides of the Skyline run as you avoid the skiers. More than five months of that and you'd be blind, and dead too.

A year of chairlifts would probably be enough to drive you from the sport. Queuing up like a sheep waiting to be dipped, having one's precious board flayed by skiers, and one's precious bum whacked by a 130-year old farmer with a broom, is all a bit much. And that's without dangling in white space with nothing to do for twenty minutes at five-minute intervals.

So, snowboarding is the best thing in the whole world, but it's not all good. It does cost a lot of money, and it would be wrong if we were to enter our retirement with no money whatsoever for food and corn plasters because we had blown our life savings on going boarding every weekend of every year. So we should be thankful that there is actually a season, and that's it not all that long. Snowboarding would be terrible if we could do it all year round. Maybe.