My New Skateboard Trick

I have invented a rad skateboarding maneuver, which is basically a one-footed ollie (or 'ollie north' if you were born after 1985) with a hand-clap below my extended leg. I predict it will herald a new era of joyous percussive skateboard tricks and I will be accorded the status of a maester gnarchemist (which is an alchemist of gnar). I have naming rights over this banger because I made it up, but I'm not certain what to call it. 

It ought to be a word with 'oly' at the end - "melanchollie" is the best-named trick of skateboarding. Top of my list just now is "Holy Mollie!". The exclamation mark is part of the name. Other suggestions are welcome.

***UPDATE - it is now called the Gosh Gollie!***

Here is a Gosh Gollie! filmed in super slow-motion:

Birds of Summer Hill

I haven't posted anything for a while, because I've been on holiday in the UK and Japan, and I've been busy at work - I'm now full-time in the News Library at ABC, which I'm really happy about. I'm also concentrating on another writing project, which I'm excited about, and which I may post something related to, but until then:

This is the logo of the Young Ornithologists Club. I still have this patch from around 27 years ago - I've sewn it onto my satchel. The YOC would take us on organised birdwatching expeditions to nature reserves, but a large proportion of their activities involved walking the beaches around Carnoustie and recording the number of dead seabirds we found there. Collecting data on birds was the prosaic side of the YOC, and probably the truly ornithological side of it, but it was still a thrill to find the rainbow bill of a skeletal puffin among the tangle of seaweed on a tide line.

Apparently on one YOC outing I pulled my brother from a frozen pond after he fell through ice. I don't have much memory of this. I remember a small round patch of ice in misty woods, and I remember walking in wet clothes through wooded paths, but I don't remember any drama, and I wonder if my scant memories have been implanted there by the telling of an exaggerated story.  Much of my childhood is recalled in this way, and I wonder if the drugs I did as I was growing up have given me a kind of brain injury that manifests in this way. I will never know.

I still love birds. It's been a great thing about coming to Australia, but it's also the thing that gives me a terrible sense of geographic distance. I had felt little homesickness until I looked up at some ibises perched on the roof of a red brick university building, and got a terrible sense of separation. It must have been the exotic birds on the familiar Victorian architecture.

I never intended to collect birds, but there's a lot of them around my flat anyway. Here's a few:

The News Library

I took part in a film at work for Information Awareness Month:

I work for ABC, Australia's national public service broadcaster. As I say in the film, I am a Cataloguer, but for the past five weeks I've been working as a TV news researcher. It's been good. I'm reluctant to return to cataloguing. As a cataloguer, I shotlist ABC's news/current affairs broadcasts. The catalogue records feed into production, with researchers using shotlists to locate material.

But cataloguing is, for the most part, an isolated activity. It is necessary to wear headphones to listen to the material on which you're working, so there is very little conversation in the room. The workload is also pretty high (an ABC cataloguer will tackle at least one 30 minute broadcast every day, researching provenance of material, locations etc. as they go), and the levels of concentration that are sustained make it inappropriate to distract colleagues with chatter.

Some years ago I might have welcomed such a monastic profession, and in fact I may have sought the ideal of a solitary archivist toiling in a basement when I started out on this occupation, but I no longer find this desirable. I've enjoyed working in the news library. The phone can ring at any time. It's more collaborative and more exciting - I had the experience of quickly pulling a tape for overlay on a breaking story and watching an editor run down the corridor with it, to see it broadcast moments later on our flagship news programme. In this way it can be instantly gratifying.

The people in the news library are brilliant, and it's interesting to work with the journalists and other ABC branches around Australia. I went out for post-work drinkies, which hasn't happened in 2 years of cataloguing. And you are also working with new production technologies adopted by the newsroom. But most of all, I think I am good at it.

The Smiths

There is a receptor in my brain whose sole business is to appreciate The Smiths and Morrissey.

One of the many things to love about The Smiths is the amazing cover art. I have been trying to recreate the style of Smiths record covers using Photoscape photo editing freeware. 

Crows

We worked with chainsaws on the blackthorn brier, and threw the densely tangled wood onto a pile that became a large bonfire late in the autumn afternoon. The garden was 2 acres enclosed by a high wall of red brick. Against the northern wall stood the remains of a Victorian glasshouse, its glazing pushed out by plants that had burst from within over years of abandonment.

Beyond the wall, the garden was surrounded by belts of fir trees, which gave further protection from the winds of the Perthshire hills, so that the bonfire filled the garden with smoke sweetened by sloe berries that popped on the burning branches. Rusted remains of agricultural equipment protruded from the needle-carpeted ground beneath the trees, and high above roosted hundreds of crows.

The crows' calls sounded over the chainsaws as we laboured, and their cries grew in intensity when we finally pulled our sweating hands from sour-smelling gloves as the light began to die. We withdrew to the caravan to eat, drink and to smoke. The men laughed into the night, and I did not tell them that, when I cupped my hands around my eyes and looked through the reflecting windows into the darkness, I could see a hundred crows or more gathered around the blackthorn bonfire, primary feathers overlapping as they held their wings outstretched to capture the heat of the slow-burning embers.

Cammeray Skatepark

I rode my bike to skate at Cammeray a few days ago. I found a good route across Darling Harbour to cut through the CBD, and onto the Kent Street bicycle lanes, before traversing the Harbour Bridge.

wind blows flags on a mast by Sydney Observatory

bike lane across the harbour bridge

Once over the bridge into North Sydney the streets are far less bike-friendly, particularly on the approach to the skatepark, where a triple-carriageway road overpasses a multi-lane highway. The skatepark is bordered by the off-limits grey and green wastelands of the aforementioned roads and a gold course; there is a tennis club on another side. It's the worst kind of austere urban landscape, windswept and unsympathetic. The only people on foot are golfers scowling at the half-acre of fairway the skatepark has deprived them of.

Cammeray skatepark is a plaza-style 'street' park; it has no transition, just flat banks, ledges and rails, which is fine by me. The surface is amazing and the obstacles are fun - the 'whale' thing is a hoot. I would skate there more, but it's further than Waterloo, which is also a nice wee street plaza park.  I stuck some Cammeray footage into this shocking little video of Sydney skateparks that I have cobbled together from iPhone footage. I used Prefab Sprout's King of Rock 'n' Roll because, like my skating, it is the opposite of hardcore. Switch-epic. The music and terrible editing amplify an atmosphere of lameness. I am 34.

 

Three Sydney Skateparks

Skateboards on Bicycles

I like to ride my bike to where I'm skating. Public transport can be a toil, and when driving I tend to become zoned-out (what we would call 'glaikit' in Scotland) or frustrated; on my bike I tend to arrive warmed-up, alert and ready for some FUCKING ACTION. 

But there is the problem of carrying a board on a bike. I have a backpack that I can strap a board to, but backpacks lead to a sweaty back, and my saddle was getting torn up by my griptape scraping aganist it. Bungee pannier straps leave your board flopping around behind ye. So I got my sewing machine, some velcro and denim, and stitched up this thing to strap my skateboard to my pannier rack. It is a fabric wallet that enfolds the deck, with velcro straps attached to hold the board firm across the top of my pannier rack. It works really well.

Skateboard pannier carrier. The central panel is reinforced with a piece of heavyweight cardboard

Skateboard in pannier carrier

Skateboard strapped to bike pannier, like a sexy skateboard spoiler

I only ride short distances to go skate - 20 kms is about as much as I can take before I burn through so much energy that the skate becomes pointless. But here is a great wee film of a human-powered bicycle/skate tour of the length of New Zealand from John Rattray's excellent blog.