High society in St Moritz

T here are a great many Russian imperial eagles scattered about the Carlton Hotel in St Moritz.

In homage to Tsar Nicholas II, who, it was said, pinpointed the hotel as a future summer residence some time in the early 1910s, one of the restaurants is called Romanoff and the children's club rejoices in the name Little Tsar'.

In fact, the Emperor of Russia was gunned down in Ekaterinburg before he could visit the Swiss town and the Carlton's tsarist links exist only in its fantasies and full-blooded interior design. No matter.

Eagles suit its high ceilings and sweeping views over the lake, and there are certainly enough Russian visitors these days to make up for the Romanovs' failure to attend.

Our gratifyingly handsome ski guide, Mario, regaled George, my husband, and me with tales of beautiful young Muscovite princesses who are so grand they don't even ask him to clip up their boots: they just sit impassively, staring into space, no doubt dreaming of diamonds, until he catches on and kneels before them, grovelling in the snow to adjust their fastenings.

Then, while we recuperated after a hard day's tumbling down the slopes, I engaged in a strange game of spa Russian roulette with a Slavic fellow guest who looked like he was tough enough to fasten his own boots.

I have Russian roots myself and felt that if he could stand the hottest steam room, so could I.

No bagna was ever more furnace-like and neither he nor I tolerated more than a few anguish-laden moments before bursting out into the cool, marble-lined halls of a baths complex so complex that we never even tried the effect of half of the switches and levers that regulate temperature, bubbles and tides.

There is even a little hatch in the swimming pool, like a servery in a B&B, that you can swim through to find yourself outside, eyeballing a black squirrel in a snowcapped Christmas tree six feet from your head.

Anyway, the thalassotherapy no doubt did wonders for our aching muscles as we were back on skis the next morning.

St Moritz, which is a very charming mostly 19th-century village perched halfway up a mountain in the Engadine region of Switzerland, and which enjoys 322 sunny days a year, has so much to offer in the way of shopping – it is wall-to-wall Prada, Balmain and Gucci – that you may be tempted to forget about the skiing altogether.

This would be a terrible pity since there's nothing more exhilarating than a denim blue sky, royal icing-white snow and bright sun.

Thanks to the dashing Mario, we made great progress on the slopes, although there was one point when my boots were hurting, I was tired, it was nearly lunchtime and the lure of the shops was strong enough to make me curl up on the side
of the piste, snivelling, and volunteering to go back to the hotel.