Early Morning Dulwich Hill Shred Sled Session

I'm trying to use my iPhone to film myself skating, and here's my first attempt from a few months ago. It's at Dulwich Hill skatepark (at the Jack Shanahan Reserve), and it's the first time I'd been skating since I got hit off my bike by a car, so I was moving a touch gingerly.

I figure that filming myself helps me set targets to make tricks. Skating's also a part of my life totally distinct from work and from a lot of my friends, so I want to be able to point to something and say, "this is what I do." Until now, I didn't have any video or photographic evidence from over 24 years of skating.

The music is 'Love Came Tumbling Down' by The Monks.

The bird is a Tawny Frogmouth that sat outside my back door for a while.

Annandale Skatepark Bike Trip

A few days ago I rode out on my bike to find Annandale skatepark in Sydney's Inner West. 

I was keen to use my board because I had painted on the griptape for the first time in about 20 years. I wanted to write something antithetical to the gnar-text usually seen on skateboards, so I wrote "BBC Radio 4", which I probably listen to more than anything else these days. Incidentally, Radio 4 are reportedly seeking to reshape their image into something more 'youth-friendly', which is a terrible idea. Radio 4 is something that people will come to as they get older, and that's fine. I wasn't aware of it as a child or teenager, and I would have hated it. But now I love the high-mindedness and seriousness of programmes like In Our Time and Start The Week, I love the news, and I love the comedy, and I would be right pissed off if R4 had its tone diluted with an affectation of youth-speak. Radio 4 is rad, and this is official, cause it's written on a skateboard. I also wrote Dusker (my wife Dee's band) and drew a lightning bolt - lightning bolts are cool.

So off I bicycled with my newly-decorated board strapped to my back, and the first place I stopped is a storm drain that runs through Summer Hill to the Hawthorn Canal. It is near murderous to wish for drought in Australia, but just look at this thing. I wish that trickle of water would dry up and allow a skate.

I rode on, and arrived at Annandale skatepark. It's a piece of shit, but the viaduct is pretty. The skatepark is a modular thing with a few quarterpipes and a little driveway. It's narrow, so there's no scope to carve around. 

The flat bank has a horrid crack across the bottom that my wheels got stuck in, and it chucked my into the bank the first time I rode the park. Shitey.

So I stuck around for a few minutes, then rode off to check out somewhere I'd noticed in the Richard Murden Reserve by the Hawthorn canal in Haberfield. I guess this is intended for BMX bikes. I don't know. 

It is too rough to skate. Maybe some fun can be had with big soft wheels, but there was nothing for me here, so off I rode. 

This is my bike, by the way, it's a 1968 Claude Butler with a full contemporary Campagnolo set. I'll give the full story of losing my old bike in a car crash at a later time, I think.

I hadn't really had a proper skate after all this, and riding home I saw some basketball courts and decided to stop for a little bit of flatland. I like skating around basketball courts, it reminds me of  Rodney Mullen's part from the Plan B Questionable video. It was fun, there were sections of grass between the courts that you could blast across. Wheeee!

And then I rode home.

Second Try

So I had to set up a new blogger account because of compatibility issues between my email accounts, so the secret shredder account is dead before it really began. I had also fallen out of love with that name. I've called this Terminal Moraine, and if I had a band, I would call it that as well. The reasons for this include that I like the connotations of geological timescales (terminal moraine is a feature of a glaciated landscape - it has stuck in my head since high school geography) and I like the suggestion of lethality in 'terminal', and the strangeness of the word 'moraine'.