They tell you the world’s your oyster and you think - great, they must mean life is a merry jaunt beset with luxurious possibilities. They don’t. They mean it’s a never ending sequence of anticlimaxes slurped from empty shells in which you can always see your own, crying reflection.Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed the Roller Disco last night tremendously, it’s just here I am, reaching with an arm both black and blue for that eternal list of things that I’m rubbish at, ready to add yet another entry. And yet - I was so sure I’d be good at it. I mean, why wouldn't I be?
I tied up my roller shoes and approached the skate rink with all the surly confidence a boozed up moron enjoys, only to witness my legs flay out in front and behind of me like the spindly pins of a newly born giraffe, who would have at least have had simultaneously becoming aware of its own empirical consciousness as a sort of excuse -
‘Fair play Spotty - you might have been gash at skating but you were experiencing experience for the very first time, so you’ll hear no more on the matter from us, son. That daft student with half a mullet on the other hand had no fucking excuse…’.
Not matter what combination of leg-pushing, weight-shifting or composed launching I tried, I either startled forward like a horse you’d just prodded up arse or wobbled out for half a yard like a toddler playing in a pair of its Mum’s high-heels.
Occasionally, in the waves of fluid motion that had formed like a jeering carousel around me, I’d pick out a friendly face and latch to them like a tragic middle-aged divorcee who’d entered the desperate final third of a night out on the lash.
Like her, I wanted answers – answers to why life is so cruel, why it is so hard, why you can give and give so much and get so little in return – but it wasn’t love or even a kebab that I was after, it was simple motion. To experience, just for a brief moment, a successful glide across the floor, to fan the beads of sweat from my face in a breeze created by my own ability to cascade.
Instead, I’d generally bring them tumbling down with me. That was the only move I perfected in two hours.
And so as my stubborn, outraged mind tried to get its self around the concept of being monumentally shit at something an entire room of people were performing with general competency, I began to cling to the thought.
The thought that while spinning around on the spot, leaping off stuff or just going quite fast are impressive aesthetic feats in the world of drunken roller-skating, there is another, somehow more honourable move in the reportire that I could hold my head up high and say I was good at.
Falling on your arse is easy, but managing to get back up quickly, and to not seriously injure anyone or yourself on the way is certainly not.
And so while I must have spent at least 20% of my time clinging on at the sides – in the line up of the shamed that is the roller disco’s equivalent to the queue at the GUM clinic – the other 80% was spent honing the art of the relatively painless tumble in which remarkably few people were up-ended by my pathetic flailing.
So although I may well be reaching for that list of things I’m shit at to add yet another of life’s simple activities, the list a fragile ego keeps to console a simple man is only ever just folded up somewhere in another pocket, ready to restore your faith in yourself - and in a world of oysters, if needs be.
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