Today a massively wide and sudden avalanche killed a family of 3 plus their snowboarding guide in Tignes, in France.

Some people I know had been skiiing in that EXACT area only half an hour before.

My current wife said that they’d been lucky not to have been there.

I questioned the use of the word ‘ lucky ‘ and its appropriateness in the circumstances.  Not agreeing with me is normal, of course…

I put various alternative phrases forward, to no avail, but finished by saying that I bet none of the 11 cyclists who’d been with me that day in June 2013 had ever said ‘ it was lucky that I wasn’t there as that motorbike came around that corner too fast, or I’d be paralysed too ‘

So timing, chance and the mountain ‘spared’ my friends today.

But lucky, they were not.

Today in Tignes, no one was lucky.