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.