There are two kinds of ski resort, I reckon - just as there are two kinds of skier. The speed freaks don't mind holing up in surroundings grimmer than a Stalinist gulag provided they can carve up the powder all day and locate just one bar in which to brag half the night about life as a human catapult coming down the black. The slitherers, on the other hand, pray for a pretty village, decent shops, mouthwatering restaurants, maybe even swimming pools, saunas, beauty salons . . . Anything, anything, to break up the day, when you know that if you stay another minute on the slopes you'll break precious body parts to bits.
I need hardly tell you which lot I belong to. There might have been no return to skiing at all last winter, if a teenage daughter hadn't turned gap-year chalet girl in Val d'Isere. Had we not a parental duty to see that she was surviving with less trauma than the poor victims of exploitation (and excess vodka) in War and Piste on the telly - located in this very spot? Of course we had.
After watching just one episode, I took a dislike to Val. The downtrodden chalet helpers were forever trailing mournfully along what looked like one dull, endless street - or else getting plastered in discos which, to my anxious eyes, didn't look all that different from the ones TV regularly treats us to in Ibiza, with a bit of extra pine. Strange, because the image previously fixed in my mind was of a resort so carried away by its fashionable image that a bowl of onion soup in a workmanlike cafe by the lifts might cost 100 francs. (Daughter's correction: No, Mum, that's Courchevel.)
The real Val d'Isere, I'm relieved to report, is so sparklingly attractive in every way that He Who Never Holidays in the Same Place Twice has decreed we're going back. The verdict - arrived at over vin chaud on day three - is that it has everything we'd always hoped for in a ski resort but somehow never quite found all at once.
Like good snow, for a start. Last winter was exceptional in the Alps, so it would be foolish to get too carried away by memories of the deepest fresh snow we'd ever seen. (Even on the slow climb up from Geneva, snow was extravagantly plastered over the landscape like cream on a pavlova - a brilliant contrast to all those years when the ski transfer trip was spent peering out hopefully for a merest glimpse of white.) But it seems that, even in winters of less abundance, Val d'Isere is one of the most reliable resorts for snow, from before Christmas right through to late April. The village itself is at 1,850 metres; the mountains all around rising to 3,500 metres and beyond. Up on the Pissaillas glacier you can be sure of skiing even in the height of summer.
And what vast, varied, awesomely beautiful terrain. There are so many lifts, so many runs, linking the three villages of Val d'Isere, Tignes and Le Fornet that you could come here for years (at my level, at least) and still have plenty of new ground to discover. Even with the influx of skiers in our February week, which coincided with the French schools' vacances de neige, we often found ourselves alone, making the first tracks on a perfectly groomed piste as the mid-morning sun broke through opalescent cloud, turning the virgin snowfields to either side as blindingly white as Antarctica.
When crowds gathered on the lower slopes in the afternoons, the high-capacity lift system melted the queues away. I especially loved the Funival - a funicular train, running every few minutes, that takes skiers up a thousand near-vertical metres through the mountain from La Daille, at the bottom of the village, in just four minutes. And the town council deserves a gold medal for the free and unbelievably frequent shuttle buses that plough up and down the long village street, stopping close to all the lift access points. They make the whole ski area rapidly accessible - and bring you home speedily, if need be, when you suddenly discover your legs have turned to jelly.
What else did we like about Val? The fact that it has plenty of restaurants serving decent French food - from rustic and savoyard to sophisticated - at reasonable prices. Again, you'd need more than a single week to get round them (and even then it could be hard, with return visits to Le Lodge for tartiflette and La Ferme de l'Adroit for raclette obligatory). Come to think of it, I'd almost go back all that way and inflict the same agony on 51-weeks-dormant muscles just for the exquisite patisserie of Les Clarines. (NB: No damage done. Skiing works better than the Hip & Thigh Diet.)
There are plenty of swish shops, too, in the village, which is itself a pleasant place to amble through. Substantially renovated during the 1980s in preparation for the Winter Olympics of 1992, its fine old buildings sit happily alongside new ones with traditional echoes in their stone and timber facades. The church - austere on the outside, extravagant Savoy Baroque within - is well worth seeing: always supposing you don't spend all your spare minutes and francs in Decales (a whole basement full of Prada) or Killy Sport.
Oh, yes - and the supermarket in the middle of the main street stocks a pretty extensive range of champagne at prices which it would be sinful to ignore. Buy a bottle on your way back to base in the late afternoon, plunge it into the snow on your balcony just before you clamber into the bath and hey presto, it'll be perfectly chilled when you emerge, craving an aperitif. Who needs a mini-bar in a situation like this? And what mini-bar imprints on your mind a picture of those towering mountains, framed by icicles like rows of translucent shark's teeth strung up along the eaves? The ex-chalet girl doesn't think she'll ever find anywhere to match it. We probably won't even try.