Anthony Ferner
Many years ago, when our kids were still young, my wife gave me a pair of inline skates for my birthday. I was already well into middle-age. I wrote a piece in The Irish Sunday Tribune about my attempts to learn. I’d wanted to call the article ‘Memoirs of a geriatric rollerblader’; the subeditor went with ‘Get your skates on’ instead, and accompanied the piece with a flatteringly way-off-the-mark cartoon of a lithe and handsome man, tall and athletic, in a ‘born-to-be-wild’ sweatshirt being admired by all and sundry.
Over the years, I’ve kept up my skating. When I began to have chronic back problems (don’t we all?), inline skates gave way increasingly to ice skates. The basics are not dissimilar. The main difference is that for inline skates the friction between skate and surface is much greater than with ice skates, so the effort required to move is considerably more. Add to that the fact that inline skates weigh at least half as much again as ice skates. Half an hour on the road and you really know you’ve done exercise. So I frequented the local ice rink, where mid-week a group of determined old geezers, both men and women, many with bad backs, would gather to perfect their techniques and support each other. Most of them were figure skaters. I persisted with hockey skates: they call for a different set of techniques, and are more suited for sudden shifts of speed and direction. I worked on my own moves - reversing grapevines, cross-under rolls, crazy legs, one-legged backward slaloms, barrel roll variants. Their names appealed as much as their fluid magic. Some of them I mastered. Others - like crazy legs, in which you create the illusion, when you’re doing it right, of running furiously without leaving the spot - I was still working on when lockdown came, and all the ice rinks closed.
The lockdown is mental as well as physical. You say to yourself, I guess I have to narrow my horizons, adapt to a closed world in which what was possible before is no longer possible… in short, give up my pleasures. Then it dawns on you that there is still space to do things, if you’re lucky.
So, in late March I fetched my inline skates from their storage, greased the bearings, flipped the wheels, tightened the bolts. They’re a great pair of skates. I’ve had them fifteen years or more. They’re very responsive, but also just a little temperamental, like thoroughbreds: there’s a fine line between responsiveness and instability. When I first had them, I felt as though they’d slip away from me and I’d fall over backwards. Over time, the muscles adjust, reading the minute slivers of feedback and reacting to them. Every pair of skates is subtly different.
When lockdown came, I’d barely done any inline skating for six or nine months, so I had a feeling of trepidation when, one late-March afternoon, I ventured out, accompanied by my sons who took turns on a spare pair. Skates are hard enough to handle on smooth surfaces, let alone on the rough, badly maintained roads of our towns. Just leaving the house was a trial, a mental barrier to overcome. Even a good skater can look a novice on an uneven pavement. And I was rusty. I was grateful that there were few passers-by. A few minutes in, though, and I had my skating legs back. My sons looked as though they’d never lost theirs.
Usually we’d have gone to the local park, with its good, flat paths. But we wanted to avoid the crowds that were still gathering in green spaces in those early weeks of lockdown. So we headed north away from the parks and the town centre, through the potholed side streets to a long, straight residential road, with a green avenue of trees running down the centre.
There was no traffic to speak of, a (fairly) smooth road surface, a gentle breeze, sunshine. The son on the skates had soon disappeared in the distance with his young man’s powerful, long-legged skating action. I rolled along behind him, feeling a sudden enormous exhilaration, a sense that lockdown would be bearable if I could do this.
For someone whose day job has been intellectual rather than physical, whose mental processes are constantly geared to planning, analysing, thinking about the next project, skating comes as blessed relief. You are, hypnotically, in the moment. You pay attention only to the physical sensations of push, glide, return, push, glide, return. You hear the swish of the wheels, the creak of the bearings, feel the pendulum movement of the body as the weight shifts with every stride. There’s a glorious sense of moving from one unstable equilibrium to another, knowing how far you can push yourself into defiance of gravity without falling (unless you hit a pothole). And you’re very conscious of how lucky you are to live in a place where there are not too many people around. In the bigger cities it would all be impossible.
I’ve taken it easy with the skating, wary of aggravating my old back trouble. Even so, I’ve had a couple of uncomfortable injuries to muscles faced with unfamiliar demands. But lockdown has found ways round things like that: I simply booked a Zoom session with a physiotherapist. We discussed the problem, and she emailed me a sheet of exercises. In a few days I was ready to go again, surprised and pleased at the resilience of the ageing body.
In my early days of skating, when I was still learning the technique, men in cars would often slow and wind down their windows to shout abuse at me. I triggered some genuine emotion in them. It was as if they were angry at me for enjoying myself. My friends thought I was exaggerating, because it didn’t seem possible that there was so much pent-up fury out there waiting to vent itself on such a harmless target. Nowadays, in the epoch of twitter storms and social media pile-ons, such reactions are more to be expected.
But strangely I’ve had few comments as I glide along in these lockdown days. If anything, the remarks are positive. A couple of days ago a woman, probably forty years my junior, called out in a friendly tone that she wished she had a pair of skates. A couple of community support officers in a quiet back street smiled and greeted me as we passed. For the most part, I attract no more than a quick glance, if that; at worst a muffled laugh. Cars queue patiently behind me when I have to skate for a stretch on the main road, waiting for me to get back on the pavement. Nobody seems too bothered.
Is the combination of lockdown, existential angst and sunny weather making us more tolerant of difference, eccentricity even? I’d like to think so, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I also worry that the government, in its patronising authoritarianism, will find some expert or other who thinks it a good idea to confine the old to their homes, regardless of their health and fitness. If it ever came to that, I’d be happy to join a revolt of the old geezers. I’d be on rollerblades, maintaining adequate social distance, my sweatshirt emblazoned with some defiant slogan: ‘Catch me if you can’, perhaps.
Anthony Ferner is a novelist and academic. His latest novel is Life in Translation, Holland Park Press, 2019.