Chapped Lips and Bad Backs - The Price of Living Your Dreams.

This time last year the Fox Spot was already starting to take shape. Now we know it's time is limited thanks to the redevelopment of Burgess Park and the inclusion of an Olympic size BMX track.  The site of the Fox Spot is where the final corner before the home straight will be.

Continuing to add to the Fox Spot seemed stupid if it's only a matter of weeks away from destruction, so a new site was needed.  Thanks to Johners' and James' keen senses, we have one.

There's no telling how long this will last so for now it's staying a SECRET location.  But you can see how we got on with the fist afternoon of building below. Fingers crossed there are going to be many more to come.

[LIALC]

The beginning

Fuck the Olympics, build a skate-spot

Salvaged

Johners' gadgets

Mixing by hand

Ingenuity

Fag break

The Hip

Keep it tidy.

S.E.D.J. Day 22 - South London Street Skating Eutopia.

I don't see myself as a worrier.  I'm generally pretty good at figuring out the stuff that is out of my control and letting fate or the universe or whatever, sort things out.  Planning where to skate over the last three weeks has affected my sleep, being able to squeeze in the lunch-time skates has definitely affected my heart rate and blood pressure.  Now that I'm only 9 nine days away from the end of Skate Every Day in January I was starting to get a bit obsessive. As with many things in life, sometimes things just happen for a reason. Like today.

We had no real plan other than meet up at Elephant and Castle and go find some street spots. On my ride to E&C the sky looked a little dark and for a split second I thought rain was going to stop play but that feeling passed.  As soon as I hooked up with Adam, Ivan, Jamie, Alex and Martyn, any stress-head tendencies disappeared and all I had to worry about was staying on my board, shooting some crappy photos, missing Alex's make on his blunt-slide transfer to grind while on filming duty and laughing a lot.

Martyn going high at E&C wall.

Ivan got the grind, but preferred this shot.

This was the second time Alex made this bluntslide-transfer to 5-0 down the corner.

Refreshment break.

I don't really know what to say about this shot.

Johners' frontside bluntslide transfer close-up.

Alex Wallies over.

Work continues on Jamie's Planking Documentary.

Johners styling out his Front-Rock pop-out.

A blurry compact digital shot of Martyn's Front board.

You don't need a blow by blow account of what happened.  It's getting late, I'm completely done-in and writing this is sapping the very last remnants of energy from my brain.  Let's just say that Day 22 raised the bar.  Skating a real street spot that was so much more fun than it originally suggested and doing it with some of the best people out there.

Day 23 is going back to Stockwell.  It's an after work visit this time, from 6.30pm to 7.30pm. If you are around I'll hopefully see you there.

[LIALC]

S.E.D.J. Day 4 - Playbox-Baystation66 - Old Faithful

Can someone please explain what the hell I was thinking when I decided to cycle to work today? I can still hear that bloody wind out there.  To be honest the ride to work wasn't so bad.  The ride from the office to Playstation/Xbox/Bay66 was as bad as it gets.  I was completely soaked by the time I arrived.  My shoes were the worst, you know when you can actually judge the water level inside with your toes, no?, just me then.

The ride home was even worse. 10 wet miles into a bloody headwind after a bit of a battering at the hands of the new slidy version of the mini and a "no-pads" mini-session on the vert, was not what I needed.

What I had been in need of was people to skate with.  And wouldn't you know it the Stockwell contingent of Matt Gold, Jim Thompson and Dave Reading turned up. Love it. As did Marcus and Kev McKeon, but he was working in his shop which is in the skatepark so basically he took a tea break to come and skate with us. I still appreciate it.

Most of the night was spent skating the mini which is always fun, unfortunately tonight the ramp's surface was so slidy it taking people out left, right and centre, with no warning what so ever.  People were sliding out of stuff so much that new tricks were get done completely by accident.  I blame the bladers and their wax covered wheels.

Mat and Jim, Jim had the essentials covered then.

After a while everyone got acclimatised and we ended up having a good session with a few more of the Kingston crew, Jeremy Jones and a lad who's name I always forget (sorry dude), total rippers!

My thing tonight was just to skate everything on offer so it was a case of mini for a bit, a few runs on the vert, off to the midi-ramp, cruise round the street course and repeat.

All in all it was a good night.  I didn't go to the pub afterward as I wanted to get home a get warm again, so there was no point in being on the bicycle anyway... you live and learn.

Dave giving it a bit of the old 5-O.

Jim with some text-book front rocking.

Matt busting out the one footed ollie.

Marcus was riding his new DEATH wood.

That he'd bought from this bloke at Stand-Up Skateshop.

For Day 5 tomorrow it's a lunch-time quicky at White Grounds SE1 from about 1.15PM for about half an hour.  I haven't been there in a long time and almost forgot it existed to be honest. I'm also back on the motorbike tomorrow.

Thanks to the lads for their support tonight.  Who can tell who I'll be skating with tomorrow?

See you out there.

[LIALC]

A Challenge to the Winter!

We skateboarders like to think that we are somehow inherently creative people. Maybe that's why skateboarding chooses us and asks us to keep testing ourselves,forcing us to make decisions as to how we are going to use our boards to interact with the physical environment, in a way that challenges us and so bring us feelings of achievement and pleasure.

Creativity is just another word for the ability to have ideas.  But where do ideas come from? Maybe the idea is always there, it's just waiting for someone to tune into it so they can find it, you know, when your subconscious train of thought suddenly changes track and pulls into the station marked "Inspiration".

I suspect that my train of thought has been suffering at the hands of cerebral industrial action and severe delays thanks to unscheduled engineering works. Why do I say this? Because of my latest idea, that's why.

As a reaction to me getting less and less time on my board thanks to increased family, work and parenting commitments, I have come up with a winning idea... at least it felt like that at the time.

If you're not skating much, the answer is to skate more right?  The dream is to skate every day.  So to be realistic I figured I'd do it for a month.  I'm writing this in the start of December and December means Christmas and loads stuff that's going to make it impossible, so I settled on January. Bollox! So I'm going to... Skate Every Day In January!

January is officially shit.  It's gonna be cold, probably wet too... but maybe, just maybe skating every day will somehow brighten things up in the depths of a British winter.

So I'm going to skate evenings, weekends, lunch breaks at work, before work and probably quite a few stolen late night sessions at a covered curb spot. Hopefully I'll have people to skate with and I'm going to try to keep people informed of what's going on via this here blog.

Will my body hold up (currently encountering knee problems from getting over excited at the Stockwell Winter Games)? Will I run out of boards? Who will turn up to skate at these stolen 20 minute sessions? Will it inspire me to skate every day for the rest of my life? These and many other questions, some yet unknown, Will surely be answered in what is historically one of the most depressing months of the year.

Well, I've said it now, roll on January 1st.

See you out there.

[LIALC]

Feverish, Damp and Unhinged - Welcome To Stockwell

I've said it before and no doubt I'll say it again and again and again, I fucking Love Stockwell Skatepark!

Don't worry, I'm not going to start with the reminiscences of the skateboarding day trips in to London as a spotty teenager, no-one needs to hear that again. What I will say is that one more time the locals of this rough jewel in London skateboarding's crown have proved how to have a full-on session come Competition/Jam on a wet December Sunday.


The Stockwell Winter Games 2011 - I'm sure there were those who thought the whole thing was a waste of time and effort and maybe they were right and we are all just a little unhinged. Yet by the time we left the park and headed for the pub, all the obstacle building and organizing and skating in the wet felt very much like effort well spent.

Having 80% of the park too wet to skate just focused everyone into what was left.  When you have a good 20 or so people all skating the same thing at a feverish pace what you get is bodies and boards flying everywhere and a really good time.

Full-on back slaps to Toby, Johners and Hariett for putting in the effort to make this all happen, also to Martyn, and Harrison for helping with the obstacle build a while back.

Here are a few grabbed snaps of the day and evening, they're not remotely representative of the skateboarding that went down but they make me feel like it's more of a valid blog post. 

Keep'em peeled for more Stockwell Games events soon.... (I have no-idea if that's true, it just feels like a nice way to end).

[LIALC]