Dad on wheels

 

I’ve been doing something foolish. Last summer, at the age of thirty-five, I started skateboarding again. It’s just so I can keep up with Freya on her scooter in the park, I said at the start. I don’t need to do tricks: this one will just be easier to pick up and carry around than the longboard, I told myself as I ordered new trucks for the 7.75” Habitat deck I bought from Ideal when I was 16 years old, back when it was on Corporation Street.

But as soon as my feet were on the griptape, I knew that wouldn’t be true. Now I’m sneaking out to the skatepark at night when all of the grown-up responsibilities have been put to bed. As I drive around town, I fantasise about how, one day, I’ll be able to ollie down that stairset or do something with that ledge. I’m turning up to work bruised and limping like I’ve been at fight-club and was matched against the floor. And I’m having a great time.

What’s more, I’m better now than I ever was. Still not good, but I can consistently get the board a foot into the air, and I’ve landed a couple of pop-shuvs from standing. It’s baby steps, but I’m making progress, and I’ve still got years ahead of me. As a teenager the challenge was part of the fun, but skating was mostly a social thing. Sometimes we were working on tricks, trying to one-up each other, but sometimes were lying face down on the board racing down a big hill, and a lot of the time, if I’m honest, we were sitting around in car parks
eating snacks and talking shit. And that’s fine. We were never good enough or focused enough to become professional athletes, and messing around trying to work out who you are and how that relates to everybody else is what teenagers are supposed to do. Now I usually skate alone, the challenge is all that’s left. And between work and family I don’t have those never-ending summer afternoons to fill. Tonight I might have a couple of hours, but I’ve got work tomorrow, so I need to get a reasonable amount of sleep. On a Saturday, I can take Freya out to the park early in the morning, but she might only want to ride her scooter* up and down the ramps for half an hour, and then she’ll want to go on the play area. It might be two weeks before the next time I get to go out: my time on the board is made precious by its scarcity, and my sessions are more focused as a result.

So far, this probably sounds like a midlife crisis, but I’m happy with where I am in my life: I like my job, and it feels purposeful. I love my family, and being a dad is the most fun thing. But it does have something in common with mid-life crises, and with those summers spent messing about on skateboards with my mates twenty-years ago: it’s partly about working out who I am at this point in my life. I went into parenthood during Covid, but I’m sure this experience is the same for new parents in more normal circumstances: a baby arrives and their needs are all consuming. Your hobbies and interests—the ways you define yourself—start  to fall away: the novel I’d been working on was shelved, I was reading less, cycling less, going out less. But then at some point you come out the other side and start to have more time again. And you realise that you contain multitudes. I am not just the triumvirate of dad, partner, worker. I am those things and I am skateboarder, reader, baker, history fan, poet, watcher of films, listener to punk and indie and trad-folk and prog rock and all sorts of other things. And those aspects all interact with each other: if not for Freya, I wouldn’t have picked up a skateboard again; if not for the convenience of having sandwiches for lunch at work, I wouldn’t have started baking (if I’m going to eat sandwiches every day of my life, they might as well be nice ones). Right now, I’m writing about skateboarding so that one interest can help guide me back into another. There will probably be other skateboarding related things here, there might be thoughts on books and films and music. Thoughts on politics and culture. The point is to flex these muscles again and build a habit so that soon, on top of blog posts (or whatever this turns out to be) there will also be new poems, new chapters of my novel, when I’m ready, new things in print. I just need to stop wasting time at the top of the ramp, and drop in.

 

*update: I've been sitting on the first draft of this piece for a few months: since then, Freya has had a skateboard for her birthday (I didn’t push; she asked), and while Dad’s skate-school is different from a session focused on my own progress, sharing something you love with your child is another great thing about being a parent.

 

Glossary for the uninitiated:

Trucks – the metal hangers that allow you to steer a skateboard, and where the wheels are fixed.

Deck – the wooden surface that you stand on when skating. Usually sloped on one or both ends to allow for tricks. Generally has a design on the underside.

Ideal – a much loved Birmingham skateshop. It used to be located by the law-courts, now they’re down in Digbeth. On top of supplying generations of Brummie skaters, they’ve been organizing competitions, repairing the ramp at fastlands (the roundabout by the old-fire station) and generally being a hub of the community since the 90s. Support your local skateshop.

Griptape – probably self-explanatory. The black, sandpaper-like material on the top of your deck that gives some amount of grip when you are plummeting down a vertical ramp on a plank of wood. Tends to tear shoes into shreds so that you can identify serious skateboarders by the ruined state of their footwear.

At this point, you may have noticed that quality skateboards are bought piecemeal with different components coming from different specialist manufacturers. Like guitarists, cyclists, runners or almost any other niche interest groups, the skateboarding community can be a bit of a cargo-cult, obsessing over deck width, wheel softness, the exact curvature of the board etc etc etc.

Ollie – a jump. But it’s harder than that: you have to snap the back of the board down with your back foot so that it flicks into the air and get out of the board’s way by leaping upwards at the same time. Skateboarding is applied physics.

Stairset – Simple enough: a set of stairs. Skaters usually classify them by how many steps there are (and thus how difficult they are to trick down). A two-set is probably almost within my ability range, if I can go fast and commit. A nine-set is best left to fast-healing teenagers who have not yet developed a sense of their own mortality.

Pop-shuvs – short for pop-shuvits. Pop the board like you’re doing an ollie, and at the same time flick it around so that it rotates on the horizontal plane. The nose ends up where the tail was and the tail ends up where the nose was. This is considered one of the simpler flip-tricks. Technically I lied. Sometimes I pop, but mostly I just shuv-it.

Taking a five-year-old to Ozzy’s funeral cortege (and some thoughts of pop-cultural capital).

The trains weren’t running, so we took the bus to town, alighting at the back of the old Argos building on the Priory Queensway, where the bridge crosses Dale End and overlooks HMV vaults (where Toys R Us used to be) and the space previously occupied by the O2 Academy. Our root took us Hobgoblin music and the Old Square, where Tony Hancock glowers from under his Trilby, through the Victorian Arcade where the refugees from the much-mourned Oasis Market have gathered, and along the side of Pigeon Park. We arrived at around 12:15, forty-five minutes before the cortege was due to make its way down Broadstreet. People lined Centenary Way, standing on the flower beds to look over the sides of the bridge. A tram parked up outside The Exchange had been given a new name to mark the occasion, and fans paused to take a picture next to it. We joined the crowd—perhaps a dozen ranks deep—before the barriers at the junction where Broad Street meets Centenary Square. As the appointed time approached, the crowd lining the route swelled until it numbered in the tens of thousands. Others stood in the rooftop gardens above the library to get a view of proceedings, and people working in the office blocks took to the balconies to see the local hero on his way.

Forty-five minutes is a long wait for a five-year-old, but once she’d had a sandwich and was settled on my shoulders where she could see things, Freya stopped telling us she was bored. We had explained, in simple terms, who Ozzy Osborne—the man up on the screen—was, that he came from Birmingham, that he and his band had invented Heavy Metal (‘the shouty music that mommy likes’) which made a lot of people happy, and that he had died. We told her that all these people were there to say goodbye. We played a little bit of eye-spy and ‘what animal am I?’ while we waited. Freya looked around at the crowds and asked what happened to the gold men (Boulton, Watt and Murdoch. ‘They’re statues, Freya: they were important people for Birmingham too. Birmingham used to make lots of different things, and they were inventors’), occasionally asked questions about why Ozzy died and ‘what he was doing’ (this latter inspired, as far as I can tell, by the idea that if we were waiting this long he must be doing something, rather than any curiosity about the afterlife).

When the procession came into view, she understood that something was happening, and asked for my phone so she could take pictures (the one above being the best one). For me, at ground level, proceedings were passed on as rumours through the crowd, glanced between the backs of people’s heads or mediated through strangers’ phone screens. The motorcade of police bikes, the tops of the black limousines—as they came into view, the crowd’s football chants were replaced with a respectful applause—and tailing behind, the Villa-kit clad Bostin’ Brass Band, playing an oddly joyful New Orleans Jazz rendition of ‘Crazy Train’. I’m not really a metal head, but I’ve been metal-adjacent since my mid-teens and as a proud Brummie I’m glad I able to mark the passing of someone who had such an impact on music and on the cultural life of this city. As the gathered masses started to dissipate, we made our way to the library, feeling sorrow but also connection to our community. I’m not sure how much of this Freya understood, but it’s something she will be able to look back on and say, ‘I was there’.

***

There’s a concept in education called ‘Cultural Capital’. It posits that when we’re choosing what texts to teach, what composers or artists to study, we are building children’s stock of ‘cultural capital’; ensuring that everyone who passes through our school system has some knowledge and awareness of the artwork that we, as a culture, have decided is important. Usually when we talk about it, it leans towards ‘high culture’, we’re talking Shakespeare and Dickens, Van Goch or Beethoven. Critics of this idea say it is elitist, and of course there is an important debate about ensuring that the canon of works that we teach in schools includes voices that are not exclusively straight, male and Western European, but if we agree that there is such a thing as an important piece of art, then it is right that all our children should have some way to access it: we are saying ‘this does not belong to the rich and powerful, or to those who have studied/intend to study literature or music or art at University[1], it belongs to all of us as part of our heritage as human beings.’ It allows them to engage more fully when those things are referenced in public debate or in other artworks, or when it speaks to some circumstance in their own lives.

This does not negate the importance of all the cultural knowledge that a child will pick up from outside of school. The things that tie them into their communities, whether these be religious, civic, traditional[2], pop-cultural and even sub-cultural.

Thinking about the varied cultural experiences of the children I work with has made me quite aware of the things we share with Freya and how that will shape her as she grows up. We've supplemented the canon of Disney Princesses with Studio Ghibli and Matilda. She recognises Darth Vader (although when she asked to watch Star Wars, she got bored before the Death Star Trench Run) and can name at least a dozen Pokémon. She lists Rammstein and The White Stripes among her favourite bands and we came up with a dance to 'Cherry Bomb' by the Runaways which involves throwing her up in air a lot. She's been wassailing and apparently loves watching the Morris dancers at Warwick Folk Festival. I've been teaching her skatepark etiquette and which one of the mini-figures that came with my Lego Yellow Submarine is John, Paul, George or Ringo; Vicky has taught her to fly a kite and how to catch crickets in the long grass. By nature, some of these things will be ephemeral (Freya is now one of perhaps a thousand people globally who are aware of the mid-2000s Welsh indie act The Hot Puppies) some will have staying power within a particular niche interest group (Freya has commandeered a set of pink polyhedral dice from my tabletop-RPG stuff. She can identify a D20, and one day I will teach her to play Dungeons and Dragons), and some things have a big enough cultural impact that they cut close to that high cultural-capital (like when my dad sat me and brother down to watch The Godfather).

Of course some of the things we pick up in this way, we jettison or reject when we are teenagers and we are trying to work out who we are outside of the context of our families, but some of it will stay with us, and some we will return to later with a sense of nostalgia. And it all still helps to form our value our sense of self and our connection to the world around us. I’m not sure how many of the people who pass by that Tony Hancock statue in Old Square every day know who he is, but when I pass by, I am reminded not just of his unmistakably Brummie humour, but of listening to tapes of Hancock’s Half Hour with my granddad when he drove us to caravan holidays in Barmouth or Paignton.

I don’t really have a conclusion or an argument to make beyond this: share the stuff that matters to you with your children. Human culture is rich are multi-faceted and offers myriad ways to connect with each other.

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[1] I’m deliberately separating these categories: most people who have studied at university (including myself and all of the hypothetical teachers referred to in this paragraph) are neither rich or powerful.

[2] It took me ages to choose this word, and I’m still not sure it’s right one, but it’s better than the alternatives: Ethnic sound far-right and icky when talking about white people, and patronisingly othering when talking about people of colour; national puts too much emphasis on political boundaries; I like the word ‘folk’ but in this context it has a bit of an unfortunate blood-and soil feel too it, and can’t be applied to other cultural groups without dismissing the idea that those groups and places have their own ‘high’ cultures too. Basically, I want Freya to feel connected to her heritage without thinking that makes her better than anyone from a different heritage, and understand that these things can zoom-in and out, and can mix. I also want her to be able to experience things from other cultures, and Birmingham is a great place for that.