I glanced around to make sure the other passengers were equally impressed. It seemed not. A young French boy was playing with a toy cigarette that lit up. His mother seemed genuinely taken at this Christmas cracker novelty, when surely confiscation and a brief lecture on lung cancer was the order of the day.

Further down the bus the two Japanese businessmen who had also boarded at Geneva's gare routière were engrossed in their video cameras. The rest were a mish-mash of pink-clad tourists, long-haired ski bums and sturdily-booted day-trippers. Had I inadvertently stumbled onto the Stereotype Express? I looked behind me in case a sausage-eating lederhosen-trousered German was complaining about something, but thankfully no.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rules. How the office gossips would have rubbed their hands with anticipation at the sight of my travelling companion and I on this, our third platonic holiday.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't looking to start anything. She knew I liked her, I knew she knew, and we carried on as we were - a mutual support unit for our dreary ex-pat lives. So no, I was not looking to start anything. I looked across and grinned. She grinned back. It was cold, wet, and the cloud was low, but the views were still amazing.

Just a-walkin' in the rain

After wandering round the town we set off for a walk upstream along the Arve. The clouds above were yet to deliver their load, but the possibility of a downpour was ever-present. I had been thinking of trying to refind a lovely waterfall that I remembered was up this way, but I was also aware that I had got stupendously lost last time I had tried to find it, and the constant engineering works around here weren't helping to jog my memory. So we just carried on up the river towards les Praz de Chamonix.

It was not a popular day for walking. We passed dog walkers, and mountain bikers but few visitors. We passed the hotel we had thought of staying in and were both glad that it had been full. Glad in fact that all of Chamonix had been full and we had been forced to retreat not only down the valley, but all the way into Switzerland. A wet five days in Chamonix would have been suffocating for us, even in our separate rooms.

Les Praz de Chamonix is a nothing of a place. It has a couple of small hotels, and a couple of shops. Basically it is a rather dull road junction: turn right for a cable car to take you to the foot of the Mer de Glace (a spectacular sight best seen by taking the Mer de Glace train from Chamonix itself); carry straight on for the rest of the valley and eventually the Swiss border.

The river flows through a golf course at les Praz and the path cuts through the fairways and into the woods behind. It is an amazingly well-maintained course although few golfers were driving, chipping or putting anything other than snowballs as we passed by.

"What, no skis?"

It was a good ride up - the clouds were even starting to lift slightly. We scurried out of the cabine in front of the skiers, passes dangling round their necks. Following the blast of cold air we emerged from the chalet at the very bottom of the piste. We were, of course, the only non-skiers up there. Signs warned walkers not to venture onto the skiers' territory except where clearly marked, and there were no clear marks. Not that we had the gear anyway. I looked down past the chalet where a footpath led right down the mountain but there was no way we were going to manage that. So we stood there for five minutes and looked at the show-offs, the novices, the posers and the tumbling children. Carol reminisced about her own brief flirtation with ski-ing, while I wondered yet again what the appeal really was about flinging yourself down a mountain on what amounted to two small pieces of wood. It was getting cold standing around so we went to the bar.

Flégère is not high. But, at 1894 metres, it is high enough and two vin chaud later we were starting to feel it. And we were starting to notice that we had not yet eaten although it was well into the afternoon. The chalet was packed and smoky and we decided it was time to return to the valley. This time the cabine was busy. Really busy. A baffled Italian family dawdled and missed their chance. The skiers were taking no prisoners. Unencumbered as we were, however, even the Germans were no match for us and we squeezed aboard the next ride down.

When I say squeezed aboard I am really not exaggerating. I wanted to look round for the little reassuring notice. You know the one: "Built in 1984 in generic Austrian industrial town. Licenced to carry a lot of people". I wanted to look round but I couldn't because I was wedged in. Totally. I literally could not move. Carol was standing right in front of me with her head underneath my chin and, as the final person was unceremoniously shoved on board, we practically melded together pressing into each other, both facing out across to the Aiguille du Midi and Mer de Glace. My arms, caught between being round Carol or fondling a large bearded Norwegian, chose the infinitely more preferable option and thus we rode down clamped together.

The ride down seemed to take longer - physically impossible of course - but as we descended through the cloud and lost sight even of the cable from which we hung, time stood still. Of course it is always possible that we had actually stopped. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that we were moving other than our extrapolating senses. The windows fogged up with the body heat and Carol pushed back into me slightly more.

We tumbled out back at the base station, pleased with ourselves for having been up, even if we had not exactly done a lot. Carol was a little flushed which I, in my naïveté, attributed to the heat of the cable car. We walked on.

Le Paradis is a depressing clearing in the woods just beyond the golf course boundary. In the summer downtrodden ponies suffer small children for short walks. A log cabin serves overpriced and low-quality food and drink. In winter, the place is dead, but the trappings of this small enterprise are still there. It is hard to tell whether it has been shut for six months or six years - the frozen wooden signs perfectly preserved. I wondered what the owners did during the winter. Returned to their homeland - which I was fairly sure was not France - I supposed. It was starting to rain in one of those instances when the weather matches mood perfectly. We turned round, and headed back to Chamonix.

At the very edge of the wood we stopped to admire the view, the thick cloud overhead forming a dramatic backdrop to the bottom of the mountains all around, their summits shrouded. I put my arm round Carol and squeezed. Nothing very unusual in this. Except this time she gave me a little hug. Something very unusual in this. Was the grey Arve valley working some sort of magic? We broke cover and briskly made our way back through Praz to the riverside path, the rain falling ever more persistently.

In the river - no more than 15 feet wide here - a fisherman was standing. Somewhat optimistically perhaps. But on closer inspection we noticed he was barefoot. Barefoot in an Alpine river in the pouring rain in March? Was he fishing or, as we strongly suspected, getting some strange erotic thrill from the water between his toes? An aquapedaphiliac perhaps. A hundred yards further down the river we saw another one. Christ - it was a convention! No wonder all the hotels had been booked. I was surprised there hadn't been a banner over the town square: "Chamonix welcomes the 8th Aquapedaphiliac Conference. Assemble in the indoor swimming pool".

We had 40 minutes or so to kill back in a dripping, damp Chamonix and managed to kill almost all of them in a bar warming ourselves with hot chocolate. Apart from the hugging incident, nothing else had changed. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe the sudden change of altitude had affected my senses. I decided to think no more of it.

The bus back from Chamonix was totally full. Most of the passengers were an American tour group who frankly should have had their own coach. Again, our lack of baggage meant a speedy boarding and we grabbed seats on the upper level. The bus route back was more tortuous, stopping at all the small settlements between Chamonix and St. Gervais. Then we hit the Autoroute Blanche again, rain streaking against the window, and the chatter subsided. Eyelids heavy I slowly drifted asleep.

I woke some time later with my head on Carol's shoulder, and one hand slightly higher up her leg than was probably acceptable in Debrett's etiquette guide. That is my story and I am sticking to it. Carol, I suspect, was not entirely convinced by my dormant posture but, equally, she had made no attempt to wake me up and move me. However, now I was definitely awake and we were heading through the outskirts of Geneva and the end of this journey. I stayed where I was.

The next day