Monoroll

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.

Rain

Earlier today I was planning on nipping to the shops to pick up some stuff. The rain came just as I pulled on my shoes. It reminded me of school holidays. I used to get so angry any time it was wet because all I wanted to do was go skateboarding.

So, stuck inside, I made a tiny video from the window. The music is a track called 'G' from the compilation album 'Johns ABC' by Fence Records. An hour later it was sunny. Scotland, eh.