you just have to be sure you're doing the right thing

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.