Please enjoy 3½ minutes of me rollerblading to an Altered Images song.

I rollerblade now. This is, what I'm (half) jokingly calling, my mid-life crisis. I started back in 2018* on a whim after I found some skates on Amazon for £70. We were still living in Glasgow, Beth was a few months old, I was out of shape and completely bored with being terrible at skateboarding.

FFWD to 2021 and I own 7 pairs of skates and visit the skatepark on my lunchbreak every day. I've lost 2 stone and have a fairly successful little Instagram account for my skate clips. Coincidentally, rollerblading is having a moment and the direction of the scene, after 20 years of being... questionable, is pretty cool and interesting.

Monoroll is a result of conversations with some skate-mates on an extremely nerdy Slack where we decided to work on solo video projects through the summer months. Nathan put one out a few months back and Jeremy has one pencilled in for later in September.

The main goal was to have a reason to skate and to try new things. I pushed myself fairly hard but decided against trying anything I considered too dangerous (no big jumps, no handrails). I know I could do better, I know I could go bigger but with the time I had and the risks I was willing to take, I'm happy with how it turned out.

Most tricks took me over an hour to land successfully, some took several hours over multiple trips to a spot. I wish I could go back and refilm a couple but, hey ho, done beats perfect.

The song is a bit weird and I worry that the lyrics imply I'm escaping from something / someone but there's not much more to the choice beyond it kinda clicking with the energy of the clips. I knew I wanted something Scottish and I knew it had to be fairly lighthearted.

If you'd like to follow my adventures on skates, the @safetygrab Instagram account is where everything lives.

Thanks to Alex for being amazingly patient with me throughout the summer as I jumped on every single opportunity I had to skate. Thanks to the pals on Slack for the encouragement too.

* I was part of the 90s rollerblading boom and skated heavily between 1995 and 1998. The muscle memory was still there 20 years later.

Um. H-hello?

The above image is a chronological montage of photos I took in 2020. The top row is January, the next is February and so on. There's a super-massive version on my Flickr.

This montage is, appropriately, the 13th one of these things that I've made (the others live under the #montage tag). Sorry if I've inadvertently caused, y'know, things to happen*.

So hi. Happy new year. Nice to see you. What's been happening? Hmm. I see...

2020, as you know, was bad. I'm glad it's over. I talked a little about how things were going for me in a post back in June but the year didn't let up for long. Everyone in my life is still safe and well and sensible, which is my main news. I'm still working and I'm trying to hit 2021 running. To date, 2021 is trying its best to trip me up.

As the above montage suggests, Beth has been the centre of our past year. She just turned 3 and is a full-blown kid now. She started talking early so Alex and I have had an entire year of conversation with her. Hot topics right now: fairies, princesses, fairy princesses. It's strange to say but, because we spent so much time together, we'll likely have lots of good memories from 2020.

What else? I've been a terrible, terrible friend. My social calendar was sparse pre-pandemic but, Christ, I've barely spoken to anyone outside my immediate family all year. Sorry pals. I still love you and I'm determined to try harder.

The one exception is my new gang of internet pals. We're sharing a collective mid-life crisis and we talk about rollerblading all day long on Slack. No, you shut up. Big love to the Naughty Boys. I said shut up.

2021, then. Let's do it. Follow me on Twitter, on Instagram, and watch me skate. If you like what I do, please help me keep doing it.

Always forwards, never backwards. Good luck x

* Direct quote from last year: "Presuming the world doesn't entirely fall apart (and it might), I'm optimistic about 2020." Urg.