Recently in WeNiS Category

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.

Spot the difference:

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

Another Wednesday, another WeNiS.

Alas, I've been pretty slack in the whole getting-my-skates-on thing for the last month. In fact I've had a pretty take it or leave it attitude to any kind of fitness-type things for a while now. I've dragged myself to the gym, but only to get ultra-bored after a few minutes of cross-training and so go and sit in the sauna reading the WSJ.

And man, did it ever show on the skate! I was huffing and puffing and blowing houses down. I managed to make it through, but it was no longer the sweet stroll it was a month ago- I've really got to pay more attention to my body.

That is to say: me. My body is me. I forget that, sometimes.

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!

I didn't think I'd be WeNiS blogging this week. I got up on Wednesday morning, full of vim and vigour, slapped on my skates, went out the front door, saw it was raining and turned right back around. Wet roads and skates are two great things that don't go well together.

Jump forward twelve hours with me and the weather is (of course) fantastic, but by that time it's far too late, and I'm heading to the PickMeUp party (which was really good, and I have to say, PickMeUp readers all seem like really interesting, creative, friendly people. You should sign up. Unfortunately I had a bit too much to drink and am not in the best shape for work this morning), which was on Wardour Street, which means that from work I have walk down Great Portland Street and cross Oxford Street. So, right as I'm about to cross Oxford Street, whaddya know, the WeNis comes right by me! Every time I get out ... it drags me back in.

I only had my camera phone on me, but I managed to take a few good pics. It was really interesting to be an observer rather than a participator- you'd don't appreciate how big the skate is until the whole thing rushes by you from end to end. I also got a sense of the energy that comes from the skate- not just from the skaters, but from the people watching on the street; everyone stopped and turned and gasped. I was definitely not the only person scrambling for my camera. Great stuff.

d

It's Wednesday again, and that means WeNiS!

Last night's WeNiS was one of the best I've ever been on. The weather was perfect, the crowd was huge and friendly, I had a lovely picnic in the sun with a few beers beforehand, and some of my fellow skaters looked (gasp ... pant ... breathe) great.

I really want to do a photoset called 'The beautiful people of the WeNiS'. As I don't feel particularly comfortable taking pictures of folks 'on the sly', next week I want to go around asking the more exotically dressed skaters if I can photograph them. Duncan reckons this will get me "a lot of slaps". I don't see why this should be so. If someone came up to you and said they were taking photos of the best looking outfits on the skate and could they have your permission to take a photo of you, chances are that if you went to the effort of dressing up, you'd appreciate the compliment. Surely, well, if you're shy you're welcome to say no, but if you're the sort of person ballsy enough to give a stranger a slap, you're probably the sort of person who really doesn't mind being photographed. Er, right?

Anyway, in addition to an assload of photos, I also took two more little skate-movs. The first is of the skate at ground level, which gives a real impression of the speed everyone's going. The second is of a special skating maneuver, designed and implemented by my friend Mike, called 'The Waggle'. The Waggle is a high-speed skate with very little horizontal outage, which is useful if you're going at high speeds through large numbers of people. It has been studied and scrutinized by physicists and astrophysicists alike, but no-one can figure out the secret behind The Waggle.

click here to see the dog's-eye-view

click here to see The Legendary Waggle

Anyway, after the skate me and Mike skated home, which meant, when I finally made it up Child's Hill, I'd been skating pretty solidly for about three hours straight- about the first significant batch of exercise I've had in a month. When I finally hit the bed I had so many endorphins churning around my bloodstream I was practically high- I didn't get to sleep for hours. I woke up feeling like I'd been hit by a train. Still, following yesterday's shocking and annoying discovery, I forced myself up and into my blades.

This morning, instead of racing the bus, I counted cars along the Finchley Road to see how much progress I was making in comparison to the carstream (I pass a car +1, car passes me -1). I was into the high hundreds when I realized the cars weren't making any progress against me at all. Like, I never had to subtract a number from my total, because even when the cars were moving (which seemed very rare) they were moving at a pace much slower than me.

This was intensely gratifying. All the hot little commuters in their beamers getting frustrated as they're overtaken by a pedestrian, with the morning sunlight on his arms and the wind in his hair, and a big fat grin on his face. Some of them are still probably stuck in traffic as I write this. Bwahahaha.

Yesterday was the first official London Skate of the new year, and while it did mean I had to miss out on a free gig by The Clientele, I knew I couldn't miss the inaugural skate of 2005. And it was a great night- good turnout, the weather never turned bad (as it was threatening to), and everyone was smiling and happy, all the way through town and up T.Court Road. I don't know if they planned it, but How Soon Is Now? started playing as we rolled into Camden, and it couldn't have been more perfect.

Ah, Joe, how I wish I could just record the entire experience and just dump it wholesale into your brain, so you could just see how much fun it is. Unfortunately I can't, so you can watch these crappy-resolution movies I took using my cameraphone (they're in some format called 3gp, which realplayer seems to be able to play, so good luck with that)

Here's the first few moments of the skate as we come out of Hyde Park.
Here's us coming into Trafalgar Square
This one is as we come up to Piccadilly Circus.
Some comments from my fellow skaters during the interval.
Some footage I took especially for Adrian, to encourage him to come on the skate.

I'll try and take a decent camera next skate, as my cameraphone really doesn't deal too well with movement.