Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and early November,

which spells the start very shortly of the ski season. And to get a sense of what's happening

in terms of winter sports, I'm delighted to be here with Chris Radford. He is a director of the ski club of Great Britain.

Just so happens, we're actually on Wimbledon Common for complicated reasons, but never mind.

We're at quite high altitude. Chris, tell us what you're looking forward to this winter.

Well, as always, with particularly members of the ski club,

we are very passionate about skiing.

We just love it, so we're just desperate to get back out on the snow.

And the good news for this season is that it started snowing already.

What?

So it started snowing already in the Alps, not here.

And so there's a big snowfall started and coming through this weekend.

So we just, I don't know, it's hard to sometimes describe to people who don't ski

is why you are willing to give up so much time and money and everything to enjoying it.

But so it's about sensation. It's about social. It's about the outdoors. It's lots of things, really.

And yet it's something where there is a pretty hard core of about one million British people who go skiing

every year and it doesn't sort of seem to move. I haven't seen that needle particularly changed,

whereas pretty much every other part of the travel industry sees a gradual increase in the

number of people. So what's going on there?

I think the...

When we ask people at the ski club,

we ask people why they're not going skiing,

...