Once again, I didn't think I'd be WeNiSing this week, mainly due to the fact that the weather was being batshit crazy. One minute it was a gorgeous sunny day and I was lunching in the sun in Regent's Park, the next there was thunder and lightning.
I was working late and decided to make an on-the-spot assessment at 7.00 to see how the weather was holding up. Storm clouds were definitely gathering, but apparently the skate was still on so I took a chance and headed down. Hyde Park was ramming with feds and peds, and the distant strains of Supergrass in the background clued me in to the fact that there was some kind of concert on. Most of the cops were apparently unaware of the WeNiS, and seemed to resent our massive gathering at Hyde Park. Listen, Johnny-come-latelies: On Wednesday night, the Serpentine in ours, festival or no festival. Get with the programme. One of you, five hundred of us. That's democracy in action, baby.
There was a neat bit of instant karma during the WeNiS: I'd worn a shirt over my t-shirt to ward against the cold, but after thirty minutes of hard skating slog ...
[Did you know? That for the first twenty minutes of aerobic exercise, your metabolism is still in 'rest' mode, which means you're buring glucose (blood sugar). Apparently the 15-20 minute mark are the hardest because you're running low. But after twenty minutes you shift into fat-burning mode, and suddenly everything feels easier because fat is 18 times more efficient than glucose. This is very useful knowledge, because you feel that if you can just break that 20 minute barrier, you're not only going to find things easier, you're going to be losing weight, as well. Yes okay most people know this already but I was only told recently so I must say I've found it to be a really practical fact.]
... you get a bit hot, so I decided to take my shirt off. Ruff!
"Mike! I'm going to put my shirt in your bag! Skate straight for an emergency midair refueling." I said as I skated up to Mike's backpack, still on his back.
"Oi! Geroff!" Mike waved his hands behind him to prevent me from hijacking his bag.
"Oh it's like that then, is it?" I said as I started to spin the shirt round itself, preparing a towel-like device with which to snap on Mike's legs.
Unfortunately, before I had the chance to do any snapping, one of the arms of the shirt got wrapped around one of my wheels, chewing up the cuff of the shirt and jamming my wheels, sending me careening off out of the skate. I managed to disentangle my wheel and reach the last warden before the WeNiS got too far away, but Mike was still laughing away to himself by the time I caught up with him. Which was excessive, I thought. I mean, it wasn't that funny.
I love instant karma, even when I am the victim of it. The best example of IK I can think of is this one time in Greece, me and my brother had gone to this beach where the sand supposedly had healing properties. You were meant to slap this mud all over you and it was good for all sorts of ailments, so we both covered ourselves in dark, wet sand and sat about in the water. After an hour or so of this, it was time to clean off the sand.
Jeremy said: "Hey Daniel, I think there's still some mud on my back, can you wash it off?"
Heh heh, I thought, thrusting my hands deep into the mud to grab an extra big handful of it to slap on Jeremy's back. Unfortunately I also thrust my hands into some kind of extremely sharp shell or shard of glass, completely tearing open my middle finger. It bloody hurt and bled for ages.
Karma's a bitch, baby!
This is a 