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More live music last night with Uptown Lights. It was Ibe’s birthday a few days ago and Ally has baked a cake.

Lots of fun as usual.

After all that excitement it’s nice that Val has a day off work today, and in any case there’s a big storm up the hill which has stopped the trains. We buy lunch from the little bakery in Lauterbrunnen and catch the bus to Stechelberg. The pond behind the hydro station is full of frogspawn and is alive with frogs.

More signs of spring under some of the trees.

Lunch. It’s very mild today.

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Actually, this lot have been having Wednesday evening practice sessions for the last seven years. This, however is their first public performance. 

Rachel is almost hidden in the corner.

There was a good turnout to see them Rich and Colin tried a three litre cylinder of beer.

It all went well and everyone had a good night out. I wonder whether we’ll have to wait another seven years before we see them again.

Another poor day today – very few people went up the hill. Val took this pic of the normally busy Bahnhof restaurant at Scheidegg. 

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Val’s clients have been pretty diverse this season. The Dutch kids who came in February are to be expected, but this week she’s had kids from Angola and now a family from Dubai has turned up. They won’t have been very impressed with our recent weather that’s for sure – we had yet another damp, gloomy day today, with rain all the way to the summits. 

Piste machines are beginning to prepare the ground for the Snowpenair concert.

More live music tonight. Bob, Rachel, Ozzie, Steve and George have formed  a band. No idea how a five-piece band will squeeze in at the Sunstar but we’ll soon find out.

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Cast your mind back to 1978. James Callaghan is UK prime minister, and 1.5 million people are unemployed. I had a dreary job in an office in Walsall, but we did our best to have a bit of fun. As a cocky 19 year-old I liked to have a dance whenever one our local pubs had a disco night, and when Saturday Night Fever arrived at the cinema the number of these events increased tenfold. 

As luck would have it one of the girls at my office was also a dance instructor, and a group of us would spend our lunchtimes learning the moves that we’d seen in the film. While I was never going to be John Travolta, I never missed a session and I reckoned I was pretty handy.

Fast forward forty years, and I am sat in my favourite spot at the bar in the Sunstar last night when I hear Steve and Colin calling my name. They’re playing a slow number and I must dance with Val as it was our anniversary a couple of days ago.

It’s probably a good thing that I can’t remember how to dance the ‘Manhattan Bus Stop Shuffle’ from Saturday Night Fever, and in any case Duo Centrale don’t play any Bee Gees numbers, but we had our annual dance and very nice it was too.

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This morning the weather was damp and dreary, and I didn’t envy Val as she set off for work. It looks like most folk stayed in bed judging by the number of people waiting for the 8.24 to Scheidegg this morning.

Apart from Val there were precisely zero skiers. Apparently it was a similar story up at the top. Duvet days all round.

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Each year, just before Easter we have a race called the Vertical Up. The course is the downhill ski race course in reverse – racers start at the bottom and run up to the start hut at the top of the Lauberhorn. 

Any equipment can be used – skis, crampons etc, but the fastest competitors use running shoes fitted with spikes and a pair of long poles. Last year’s race was a bit of a disaster as a storm rolled in just before the start meaning that only the first third of the course was safe to use. Today the race started earlier and everything was fine. Here are the girls getting their prizes. Victoria from Zermatt was the winner.

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26 years, but who’s counting? We went out for our celebratory dinner last night, and thanks to a gift voucher from Hayley and Paul we enjoyed an absolute feast of Chateaubriand. Cheers guys!

The forecast has been predicting a beautiful day today for a while now, and that means our local skiing will be very busy. Mürren is only 35 minutes away so we popped over there to find it very quiet as usual. 

We had a late coffee at Sonnenberg, then skied down to the village and had lunch at the Eiger opposite the station. We’ve never set foot in the place before and it turns out to be just like an English pub with lots of draft beers and good food.