Brazil Alan - Theres an awful lot of bubbly in Brazil: the life and times of a bon viveur

IT WAS the most beautiful evening you could imagine in the ski resort of Meribel. The sky was inky black, the snow was as white as a tin of Dulux paint, and the stars sparkled over the mountains that loomed up all around me.

It was below zero and the freezing wind was lashing my face and making my eyes weep as I raced down the slopes. I didnt have any ski poles. I was traversing my way across the snow with a score of friends and we were holding flares above our heads, burning back at the intense cold. To the crowds of beautiful people sitting on the balconies and terraces of their million-pound apartments below us it would have looked like a firey snake was on its way to gobble them up. I had watched a similar spectacle many times involving my two older daughters, both international skiers, who were with me now.

Confidently, I turned my hips left and right as though I was back on a football pitch in front of 50,000 people, making mincemeat out of clod-hopping defenders. And then, in an instant, a bolt of terror shot through me as I realised I had come off line, and suddenly I was heading at full speed into a ski-lift pylon just a few yards away.

This is it, I thought. Im going to die. In a split-second I remembered a story we had been covering on my radio station, talkSPORT, earlier, about a member of the dynastic American family, the Kennedys, who had killed himself when he hit a tree in Aspen. He wasnt carrying any poles either.

In the same instant I was sprawled all over the snow. The flare was 30 yards away and my skis had cartwheeled through the night. I felt a tremendous pain in my chest. I couldnt breathe. I didnt know whether I had caved in my ribs or I was suffering a heart attack. I reached up to feel my face and panicked as I thought I could feel blood and my own brains bursting out of my head. But when I looked at my hand it was mud and gravel that my ski must have scooped out of the ground at the base of the pylon stanchion. Protective netting had wrapped itself around my neck, which was why I couldnt breathe.

Members of our group had stopped in alarm and were now trying to make their way back up the slope towards me. At least one of my daughters was screaming, Daddy, Daddy, what have you done?

I tore the netting from my neck and, thankfully, as I started breathing again, my chest started moving up and down. The leader of our party was back with me and he frantically tore at my ski suit to try to discover the extent of the damage. The freezing night air that attacked my chest and stomach acted like a stimulant and immediately brought me out of my stupor.

Amazingly, I had hardly hurt myself at all. I didnt realise it at the time, but the stanchions are covered in the same sort of polystyrene padding you see on rugby posts at Twickenham. My eighteen-stone bulk had bounced off the ski-lift support, and, apart from a developing bruise on my sternum and a whiplash injury to my neck, I had escaped. Not for the first time in my life my guardian angel had been looking down on me.

As my weeping daughters picked me up from the snow I reflected on why I had so foolishly lost my concentration. I was an accomplished skier. I had taken it up when I played for a season in Zurich at the end of my football career, and the first time I got on a pair of skis I never wanted to get off them. I loved everything about it. The clear blue skies, the landscapes that looked as though the gods had spring-cleaned them each day, the snow that tumbled out of the skies like freshly sheared lambs wool, and the aprs-ski. There is hardly anywhere else I would rather be in the world than in a pals skiing lodge at the end of an afternoon down the black runs, a log-fire roaring and flickering in the wardrobe-sized grate, surrounded by my family and inevitably clutching the evenings first glass of bubbly.

But my mind had been distracted that afternoon in a very big way. A few hours before I had set off on the run with a flare in my hand I had had a devastating phone call which had turned my world upside down. The contents of that call confirmed to me what I had already suspected. I had somehow managed to plunge my career into a crevice deeper than the one that encircled the landscape in front of me.

I had been expecting the call for a few days and I thought I was well prepared for the worst. I had been telling myself that I wasnt really bothered, whatever happened. I have always had enormous belief in myself, always looked on the bright side of things, never despaired at lifes cruel tricks. For instance, imagine being an international footballer and being told at the age of just 27 that your career is over because your persistent back injury has become inoperable.

Throughout a tumultuous life of ups and downs, my wife Jill, without whom I would be nothing, has lived in dread that one day we, and consequently our three beautiful daughters, would end up on the scrap-heap. Well, I havent been there yet even though I will admit I have been pretty close.

My attitude to life is different to that of most people. I will never stay at a job if I am not happy. I dont care if it is well paid, or if ten other former footballers would sprint down the M1 to take my place. If I dont like whats going on around me, or people do not treat me with respect, I am happy to walk. I had issues with the top people at the station at the time. But they have since gone following a full scale takeover of the company. I have always been confident that something better will be waiting around the next corner. And usually I have been right.

But on this occasion, for many different reasons which I will go into, it was different, and I didnt feel very good about the present or the future.

I knew when I had gathered up the family and our skis a few days earlier and set off for Meribel that I had reached another of lifes crossroads. And over the previous 72 hours the events of the week before had been gnawing away at me. So I was actually relieved when the mobile started to ring. I had had it switched off for the last three days, and even now I was taking calls only from those people I wanted to talk to. I knew a terrible bust-up was likely to have gone on after I left London, where there were a lot of very unhappy people. I saw that the call was coming from Mike Porky Parry, my co-broadcaster at talkSPORT.

Officially, Porky was my boss, but I had never regarded him as such. Not through any disrespect, but Porky had two roles at the station: he was the programme director, and as such he was the boss man, but in his second role he was my sidekick on our award-winning breakfast show, and I really only knew him as the guy who had been sitting next to me between six and ten a.m. six days a week for the last five years. He had recruited me from television because he said he recognised in me the sort of personality and background on which the big bosses wanted to base the sound of the station. I had always had an accord with football fans. As a lifelong Celtic fan, I was one of them. And having enjoyed a football career that took me from Ipswich to Manchester United via Tottenham Hotspur, with thirteen Scottish caps and two European medals along the way, I had the right credentials to talk with conviction about the game.