Skating away

In her book Skating to Antarctica, Jenny Diski writes:

'My feet haven't retained the memory of skating, but then it isn't a natural experience for feet to be constrained in an unbending boot from sole to ankle and raised on a quarter inch of steel blade so that they never actually touch the ground. Feet don't skate, but they experience skating. You sense the solidity of the ice through the blade in a way that is quite different from being on any other hard surface. Concrete doesn't feel as ungiving and absolute as ice. You slide over its surface, but there is no engaging with it, no sense, as you get even with concrete, certainly with rock and paving stones, of surface texture, of tiny undulations, of there being earth beneath. Rink ice is a solid block, whose depth you sense as you slick across its surface, as a swimmer senses the fathoms beneath them buoying them up. But the sea moves, engages with the body of the swimmer, while the ice is enigmatic, separate from the skater.

And yet, to skate is magical, as you find yourself coasting free and frictionless. The clear distinction between yourself and the ice you are on strengthens the sensation of your own body and its capacity both for control and for letting appropriate things happen. And for all the perception of physical mastery, skating is still strange and dreamlike. Dreams of flying are the nearest you get to the feeling of being on the ice.' (pp. 15-16)

Nowadays every British town and city seems to have at least one open-air ice rink at Christmas time. With the addition of fairy lights, and in a spectacular location like the Brighton Pavilion or Winchester Cathedral, these can be quite magical, although the ice rink in Liverpool One is a pretty unenchanted affair.

The town-centre Christmas ice rink seems to have entirely replaced the phenomenon of wild skating. According to Sue Clifford and Angela King, in their wonderful book England in Particular, it was common until recently to skate on the lakes and tarns of the Lake District. In his Guardian Country Diary, A. Harry Griffin described how in 1929 the railways ran excursions from London and other cities to the 'Lakeland ice carnival', where 'there seemed as many people on and around the "toe" of Windermere as on a busy summer's day in Blackpool'. In one memorable edition of the ITV regional programme About Anglia in January 1963, in the coldest winter of the century, the presenter Eric Joice presented the programme from Wroxham Broad in Norfolk, sitting at a desk perched on the frozen water while reporters skated round him under the arc lights. But Clifford and King report that 'since the 1950s land drainage schemes have meant that many of the safe places for skating – flood meadows – are no longer available'.

I like the idea of skating, but I won't be doing any of it this Christmas, as the only time I have tried it felt as unnatural an experience as Diski describes it, and I never got to the coasting free and frictionless stage because I kept being stuck in the falling over stage. But like Joni Mitchell, I sometimes wish I had a river I could skate away on.

Anyway, a Merry Christmas to anyone who reads this blog, whether you have a river to skate away on or not.