1. Tallest Dwarf Syndrome

British snowboarding is basically a fight to see who is the least shit. None of us will ever be the best, a fact that should be brutally obvious to anyone who has an internet these days, which is rammed full of really annoying professionally-coached kids doing double backflips before they have even learned how to use a fork properly.

The tippy-toed dwarf-like one-upmanship pervades every strata of our shred society: the punter in his fourth week will make out like he is a professionally qualified snowboard instructor when lecturing his beginner mate about whether to ride on a flat base along cat tracks or not; the seasonaire will drop the most unsubtle hints in the lift queue AT THE TOP OF THEIR VOICE about how they have been in resort for more than two weeks, to make sure all the punters know they are not a punter; the multi-seasonaire will act jaded about anything other than a bluebird pow day and drawl about how it was so much better in ’98, when the chalet girl is tugging away at his… err… coat first thing in the morning, desperately trying to get him onto the hill for a few laps.

And so it goes on all the way up the food chain to the pot-bellied bearded silverback old farts, comparing snowboard-injury scars and casually mentioning the time they got to ride with Jamie Lynn for an afternoon.

We are all dwarves.

3. Angle Of Thumbs

A sure-fire giveaway that you are a British snowboarder of a certain age is that you have gamekeeper’s thumb – but rather developing this affliction by repetitively throttling the necks of pheasants for 20 years, you’ll have got it by snowboarding on Dendix with unbridled youthful enthusiasm, and a total disregard for your ability to touch-type without acute pain 20 years later.

Oh, Dendix, how you were a cruel mistress. How you gave us so much for so long with your generous gifts of boned-out stiffies and dustbin-lid bonks, only to take it away again in the form of the broken scaphoid, fractured finger and dislocated digit. You have left us with a generation of floppy-thumbed, mutant-fingered mongrels-des-mains. You are a bitch, my thumbs hate you, but I quite like you really.

NB1. If you are ever formally introduced to a British snowboarder over the age of 35, you may initially suspect that they are trying to give you a masonic handshake, and thus enticing you into a world of virgin-sacrifice ceremonies, devil worship and favourable business deals. They’re not, they just can’t straighten any of their fingers.

NB2.  Please refer to point 1 about injury one-upmanship.

4.  Gets Emotional About Sheffield

Not entirely unrelated to point 3, British snowboarders will typically have a deep love of Sheffield. The City of Steel played host to the world’s most unlucky ski slope which kept burning down, over and over, no matter how much it rained, no doubt due to some sort of spontaneous combustion of all the shred joy that had taken place there over the years. Along with Hillend and Halifax, it can lay claim to being one of the most important plastic-coated quite large hills in the land. Mention it to a Brit shred, and they might just weep on you.

“The piece de resistance of the Anglo-Saxon punter is, of course, the GoPro plonked on the helmet like a lollipop”

6. Crap Jobs

Apart from those guys who are shopping in Snow + Rock, everyone else has probably had a shit job at some point, with the aim of funding a snowboarding trip or season. Chances are, if you see someone in the mountains with their hand down a toilet, or cleaning up a big pile of vomit, or scraping little bits of food off a fridge door, or peeling potatoes with a blunt blade or smiling whist they are being given shit by someone posh… they are a snowboarder.

“To those who have tried to cross-sell value added services in a call centre whilst staring at the full-page bleed of a back-copy of Whitelines… I salute you”

To those who have tried to cross-sell value added services in a call centre whilst staring at the full-page bleed of a back-copy of Whitelines, or delivered stuff on their bike whilst listening to the Afterbang soundtrack, or hauled rubble around a building site whilst wearing a pair of Vans with no toe protection…I salute you, and your resolutely British commitment to the shred.

 7.  Dreams The Dream

And finally…we are dreamers. We are eternally hopeful. How else could we build an entire lifestyle and belief system around something that we only spend 2/52ths of our year doing? How else could we spend so much money, do such shit jobs, make ourselves look like such idiots, pore over so much GoPro footage if we weren’t absolutely nuts about snowboarding?

“Like a puppy being given a big bowl of braised steak and having his castration cancelled, or a married man presented with the opportunity of sex, we soak up every last jot of the snowboarding experience that we can”

We, British Snowboarders, are the most grateful on the planet. Like a puppy being given a big bowl of braised steak and having his castration cancelled, or a married man presented with the opportunity of sex, we soak up every last jot of the snowboarding experience that we can, knowing that we will have to make it last for so goddamn long until the next time.

We dream, drunk and delusional on the mystic brew of shred, that one day we, or our kids, will actually be able to drop a front 7 off the toes before casually miller-flipping the next knuckle. We are idiots, bonkers, crazy, pathetic and frankly, a bit crap.

But by God, we love it. We properly love snowboarding. And that, my friends, makes us absolutely the best snowboarding nation on the planet.