So, yesterday, I got shoulder-tackled by a cop.

Here's the thing: Sunday I head out to Hyde Park to have a chat with Lee about a little documentary about street-skating (ironically, considering the events that follow, one of the stated goals behind the documentary was to show that street skaters weren't just pedestrian-terrorizing hoodlums). After the chat, Lee suggests we go for a street skate. I agreed, but didn't really realize just what I was agreeing to. To me, a street skate is the WeNis, hundreds of people skating along cordoned-off roads. What Lee was suggesting was something slightly different. For starters, there were only four of us. For seconders, the three dudes I was skating with were abso-smurfing-lutely insane. They'd skate headlong into crowds, oncoming traffic, over staircases, down walls, I mean, these guys were nuts. And they were fast, y'know? It was a miracle I was even able to keep up with them, let alone follow them through the thick crowds that line the south bank on Sundays.

So anyway we skate through Trafalgar Square, over the Thames, down the south bank, over the Millennium Bridge, stop for a pint outside St. Paul's (Foreshadowing! We saw a cop giving a ticket to a skateboarder, so we asked her if street skating was also illegal, to which she replied "Not yet.") On the way back over the Millennium Bridge we got roped into getting photographed in some newlywed's wedding photos. It was a damned fine day.

So we're coming back over Charing Cross Bridge (y'know, the train bridge that has a footbridge on the side of it?), now, follow me along if you will here: When you reach the North side of Charing Cross Bridge, you have a choice- you can either take the steps down to Embankment station, or you can keep going forward through a narrow corridor that goes past some travel agents and over a metal walkway. So we burn down this corridor, and, to my suprise, suddenly it opens up into Charing Cross station, and we're all rocketing along the Concourse, weaving in between people. Then I hear "Stop!" and there's this phalanx of cops all runnning towards us. Lee yells "Run!" and....well, let's take stock here for a moment, shall we?

As I've indicated before, blading isn't an overly concious activity. Your concious mind processes, at the best of times, at about 40 bits per second. This is slower than the slowest of dial-up modems on a bad line. "Don't be ridiculous," I hear you say "surely I process more than that, just looking at something transfers vastly more information than 40bps." Well, that's actually processed unconciously. If you were conciously processing at that speed, all you'd have to do is look at the page of a book and you'd automatically know what was on it. As it is, you have to conciously process each word at a time- at about 40bps.

40bps is about enough information to track about seven objects simultaneously before you have to start handing stuff over to your unconcious. Skating, particularly in crowded areas, involves (and this is a conservative estimate) tracking upward of 40 variables, each one of which changes radically depending on any small adjustment in speed or direction you might wish to make. So you generally just hand everything over to your subconcious and don't think about much. It's sort of like high-speed meditation. Which is good for me, because my brain is constantly 'whirring' -it's nice to quiet it down from time to time.

Obviously the logical thing to do, if I'd been conciously assessing the situation, I'd have come to a stop. But, much in the same way that you'd unthinkingly take steps to avoid smacking into someone if they stepped into your path, I just unthinkingly sped up, to try and get away from all these cops. So all of a sudden I'm in the opening credits to CHiPs. I got five-oh coming at me from all directions. I manage to elude a couple, the exit is tantalizingly close- when out of nowhere I'm body-checked by the shoulder of the All Blacks' prop-forward, er, I mean, by this big beefcake of fuzz. We both pretty much went straight to the ground.

At this point the story comes to a swift and terrible conclusion when I'm shot five times in the back of the head. Just kidding! Ha! Oh how I laugh.

No, what actually happens is, they bollox me out for a few minutes about how skating is illegal in stations, on streets, on sidewalks, basically everywhere ("But I just spoke to a cop who said..." "Don't talk back!"). Then the good cop (there really was a good cop and a bad cop), who is an aussie, calls headquarters 'to see if you have any priors', and while we're waiting for them to check I say: "So what about that cricket eh?" and he shakes his head and says: "Aww, it's rough mate." and we have a chat about the crickey and how long he's been in London etc etc and we're good mates by the time the call comes back saying I'm clean. So he gives me a warning and sends me on my merry way, another exciting pub-story tucked into my belt.

The arm of the law is long indeed, but it's the shoulder you really have to watch out for.

What happens when gym instructors try to write signs:

Unless you're Gene Kelly from Singin' in the Rain, it's tough to be truly camp when you're soaking wet.

I came to this (stunning!) conclusion while watching HMS Pinafore in the open-air theatre in Regent's Park last night....in the pouring rain. The actors were trying their hardest to sing their little hearts out, but it's difficult to keep in jolly character when you're constantly blinking water out of your eyes, poor dears. Fortunately, the rain disappeared at the beginning of the second act, just in time for For He Is An Englishman, so people could finally put down their umbrellas and give some hearty applause to the well-sung, well-drenched cast.

Speaking of which, I also discovered that my hosting instinct is so powerful, I am able to hold an umbrella in each hand long past the limits of human endurance, just to ensure my date isn't getting wet.

The wait is over!

You may now stop inundating me with requests for the next edition of the destruct\hour. It's here! And I do believe it is the best one yet. It now sounds a lot more polished, thanks to a series of awesome sweepers (airchecks/show IDs) made by multi-award-winning radio impresario Grant Brodie. Take a listen- it really gives the show a much more coherent flavour than the previous two shows (but don't worry, I still say uhm and aah more than any other words, and I still giggle a bit). It rocks.

1. I imagine the words: "You can have some of my heroin if you have unprotected sex with me." would do the trick.

2. "I'd like to file for divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaivour, your Honour."

"Please state what behaivour you found to be unreasonable, Mrs. Coogan."

"Well, he stuck his dick in Courtney Love, for starters."

"Divorce granted, case closed. Next!"

Spot the difference:

See it? Yep, that's how hardcore I am: I skate my wheels off.

I think the theme of Crash is twofold:

• If you're racist, you're a bit of a dick.


• Everyone is racist.

This message is played out repeatedly (indeed, the whole affair seems to occur in some kind of netherverse in which one's race is the only permitted topic of conversation) as the film covers 36 hours in the lives of seven (possibly more, it's kind of hard to tell) families as their lives interweave (in a manner reminiscent of the superior Traffic) with one another: A rich white couple, a rich black couple, a plainclothes detective and his mother, an Iraqi store-owner and his daughter, a latino locksmith and his daughter, a uniformed cop and his father, and two carjacking hoods. Each of them crosses into the lives of the others, subtly or grossly changing and affecting them.

Sometimes these crossovers are a bit implausible (per example: two cops bust the rich black couple, and then each cop independantly encounters a different half of the same couple the very next day. These must be the only people in LA), but I'm willing to forgive the coincidence in the spirit of interconnectedness that the film is bangin' on about. The flipside of this is some very sharp (and often very funny) dialogue and overall excellent acting, making the whole thing easier to believe in. Although, did you ever notice how Hollywood movies generally ignore the existence of racism in their films? Normally, if a character were to say even one of the many racist statements from any of the characters in , they'd be marked as irredeemably evil and be killed by the hero in the next act.

However the director of Crash seems to want to make up for this by having his characters obsess about race and racism. I mean, I accept that it's a reality and that it's out there (I mean, would poor Jean Charles de Menezes be dead now without it?), but I think this film exaggerates it (slightly, I mean it is LA we're talking about here) for the purpose of making a point- which is fine, but some may find the excessive speechifying a little grating.

So: it's not without its flaws. But it's a bold, well made, watchable work with a couple of memorable set pieces- that's more than most films offer these days. It probably wouldn't lose much impact if you waited to see it on vid, but I'd definitely recommend that you give it a look in.

So I'm catching the last tube home on Saturday night, and this dude staggers past me, barely able to walk. He careers to the end of the carriage and opens the first of the connecting doors. He then whips out his ding-dong and proceeds to urinate into the gap between the two doors. I suppose we should give him points for politeness- he could have just wet himself and had his urine play chase-the-fellow-commuters up and down the passenger car.

But, that aside, I really was prepping myself for the guy to go flying backwards, a charred sausage in his hands. Could someone explain the physics of this to me: if you piss on the live rail under the train, you're in a hell of a lot of trouble, is this not so?