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Naomi Grigg's skating years

Part 6

by Naomi Grigg

Life in Manchester wasn’t much more active skate-wise for the first couple of years. During the summer between my 2nd & 3rd years, I was really down and unhappy. I went to Essex for my summer placement, settled into my lodgings and stayed in for 2 weeks wallowing in my own misery. I threw myself into my work in an effort to reset myself, but it didn’t really help. Eventually I decided to get the train into London one weekend and skate around a bit. I did and it was so exiting, cruising around, exploring places I’d never been before, and I wondered why I didn’t skate more in Manchester – it would be so great to skate in and out of uni and the city centre. Everything would be so much quicker, and it would mean I was on my skates a bit more than I was at the moment. I met a guy in Hyde Park that had a pair of skates where you could remove the chassis. ‘Hypno’s they were called, and they seemed the perfect solution to pretty much everything ever – I went to the skate shop that he got them from, and they told me about a weekly meeting of skaters on a Wednesday evening. He didn’t know much about it, but since I’d shown disappointment at the numbers of skaters in Hyde Park, he recommended going along to the Wednesday evening ‘Betty Blade’ to meet more skaters.

I had a really bad case of missing the ice rink vibe. Years of pretty much solitary skating was taking its toll, so I was keen to do anything I needed to to get there for 8pm the very next Wednesday.

Wednesday came, and I was pretty excited and nervous. I went to the start point just in time for the start because I didn’t like the idea of hanging around like a no friends. It was a bad idea because as I approached the Beach, I saw a crowd of about fifty skaters surrounding two guys who were doing freestyle tricks in the middle. I got there just in time to see something that looked vaguely grapeviney, and then they stopped and the crowd dispersed. I really wanted to see what they were doing, and I really really wanted to know them and to skate with them as I’d skated with Cheri years before. I wanted to learn all these amazing tricks that the famed Hyde Park skaters were so good at. I could only imagine what cool things they could do – they must all be so good, getting to skate and learn at this Mecca of skating that I had seen referred to so many times in skate magazines.

Some guy started yelling at everyone to listen up, and announced that any beginners would stay in the park and be taught by a skating instructor called Jonathan. Then he said that the intermediates would be taken by Asha. Only the very best and very experienced skaters should continue onto the actual street skate. They stressed this final point very strongly, and I figured that I must be really awful in comparison to the skate gods of Hyde Park, so I opted for the intermediate group – it would be so humiliating to go on the main skate and not be able to keep up, especially as I was a girl and all.

 

 

Asha and I still laugh about the session to this day. I laugh because I find the fact that I ever felt such shame and humility about my skating amusing, but Asha laughs out of some misplaced utter shame. It was hilarious, but I felt like such a problem because the first thing she taught us all was to heel brake, so that she could weed out the ones who should be in the beginners group. Heelbrake? You what? Oh no! I don’t have one! I felt like such a gimp, and wanted to avoid bringing attention to the fact that I was letting down the group by being the only one without a heel brake. I just wanted to fit in! So I tried to go along with everything she was telling us to do. The first thing was the scissor. I pretended to be trying hard to concentrate and take it seriously, but something somewhere must have gone seriously wrong, because As Asha looked around an picked out any errors, she picked me – I can still remember it so well ‘ok, I can see you’re not quite getting it, you need to…….’ And continued with some advice. I was totally taken aback and decided to sink back and plod along for the rest of the session, and I did just that. Plod plod plod. SO SLOW!! These guys are intermediates?? Are you joking? What the hell are the beginners like?! It was such a tedious hour – I wondered what the experts were doing on their skate and wondered if I’d have the nerve to join them the next week.

After the session, I decided to wait to see the main group get back in the hope that maybe they would do some tricks.

When the skate came back, most of them went off to the pub and some hung around, but not a trick in sight. Eventually I approached with trepidation one of the guys that I’d seen earlier doing tricks.

“Hi, um… were you one of the guys doing some tricks earlier?”
“Probably”
“Oh cool! Um… could you show me some of them?”
*Makes like a seal clapping, and the associated noises* “ there you go”
“ahaa..um…ahaha….I mean the skating ones”
“No! I’m not a performing monkey!”
“…..um….ah….um….er….please?”
“No! I said I’m not a performing monkey you know!”

I learned my lesson, moved away, and sat back down on the curb a safe distance from his own seat.

About ten minutes later I started messing around with the barrelroll and grapevine in an attempt to make some friends – it worked on ice, so maybe it would here too, even in the land of skate gods. Suddenly the skater from earlier was heckling me. He was HECKLING ME!!!! AAAAAAAARRRGHHH!!! Could my humiliation get any worse?? But my fortunes were about to change due to the fact that I could indeed be frightened and intimidated into being the performing monkey that he wasn’t. It also turned out that he was actually a performing monkey if you pressed the right buttons.

 

“aha! But can you do it on both sides!”
“sorry?”
“can’t you do it going the other way? Come on, you should learn it on your bad side!”
“like this?”
“aha, so you think you’re pretty good but can you alternate between them with a toespin??”
“…wha?”
“like this!”

And he was up – mocking me for everything that I couldn’t do, but everything that he could do that I couldn’t was filed very precisely in a place in my mind’s to-do list. I was like a sponge taking in everything I could.

It later turned out that the grapevine was a really high level trick in Hyde Park – a fact that I found outrageously disappointing, but luckily this guy was pretty much as good as Hyde Park skating got, and his sky high expectations and mocking tones pushed my boundaries for the rest of the summer. His name was Andrew Bachelor and he quit skating a couple of years later, still better than me. I like to think that I’m better than him now, but I know he would top me within a year if he ever started skating again.

The evening ended with me skating back to the tube station with some of the others, including Asha. I couldn’t keep up. I was struggling so much, and couldn’t understand how the hell they were able to skate so fast. I actually never found out that outside edges would be a good idea whilst skating forwards until I took my Level 1 instructors qualification 18 months later.

 

 

Back to part 5

To part 7

 

Naomi's website: http://www.skatefreestyle.com/

Summary of articles by/about Naomi on this website

 

 

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