My Saturdays in this town are numbered. Cambridge hangovers are now precious resources, to be jealously guarded and frugally rationed over the course of three months. Sloppy college lunches must be savoured with relish. My smattering of buy-nine-get-one-free coffee cards must be strategically consolidated and redeemed. Resilient gardenware must be obtained and laid out for my final day in Cambridge, when I fully intend to roll in that grass off which I have so scrupulously kept. I shall finally inherit the blotched, allergic complexion of the True Brit. My teeth will grow stained and distorted. And I shall never be able to express my emotions again. The incubation is nearly over. Time for the alien within to become naturalised.
Limping towards the end of my PhD, happily maimed from the most exhausting intellectual and emotional minefield of my life, I was chatting to my sagely supervisor about the wrap-up ahead. I told him I could see light at the end of the tunnel. He responded cheerily with some up-beat lyrics, perhaps reserved for all his purgatorial students twiddling their thumbs in the vestibule of promised freedom: 'Aah, when the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.' That remark could be interpreted by future commentators as something of a downer. But as I giggled my way through the rest of the meeting, gulping down his anecdotes and struggling to stifle my ever-disproportionate laughter along with them, I couldn't help but become increasingly cheered by the image. No new metaphorical slant was making itself available. The image was fine just as it was. I was thrilled by the prospect of an oncoming train.
The enthusiastic welcoming of such future impact is definitely a sign of a PhD on the deathbed. It isn't a depressive or suicidal tick. It's merely an index of profound, gnawing boredom. I'm at a moment in the thesis where I know what my Juvenal will be about. Now I just have to trim his hair, cut his toenails, spray some aftershave in his direction, coax him into his Sunday best, and pack him off to interview - all of which equivalent tasks must be neglected in the real world, of my own body, temporarily, for the sake of getting the little guy off to a good start in this life. Against the monotonies of parenting a word document that cannot speak back to you in anything but the language of your own internal echo-chamber, the sudden rush of adrenalin on finding a light of hope converted last-minute to impending danger beckons as the best thing in the world. Anything that isn't my PhD - even insignificant and meaningless ways of troping my ambivalent future - have become the jewels of tiring days. Any mental distraction feels like the most heaving sigh of a catharsis. Which is why I have forced my recalcitrant mid-twenties body to take up skateboarding - again.
This noble pastime - last waved off when I was sixteen, and it was no longer cool - has now made a surprise comeback, when I am almost twenty-seven, and for that reason it is especially no longer cool. If some wise mentor had sat me down before my time in Cambridge and showed me through their omniscient crystal ball what I would be doing with my last days as a graduate student, I would have shattered it with my hard copy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and thumbed to the word for 'patently ridicilous'. The only flipping I would be doing would be through weighty tomes. The only grind I would execute would be that of the daily variety, lodged safely in the ethereal surrounds of the library. My reality was now nicely grip-taped: skateboarding long ago cashed in for scholarship.
And yet here I am sealing off four years of mind-slog with regular trips to the local skatepark. Whence and wherefore this sudden regression to teenage recreation? The genesis was inevitably a little different this time. When I was fourteen, I must have picked up a skateboard because, one fatal self-conscious day, everyone in my immediate vicinity was also holding a skateboard. From there came genuine fun, commitment and community, as well as a zen seclusion from the complications of teenhood. This time the approach was much more timid. I met a seriously skating coeval in London a few months ago. We soon converged on the common conversational ground of skateboarding. He told me he did it; I told him I used to. We started waxing lyrical over our mutual admiration for Rodney Mullen, the father of modern street skating. I had always worshipped this guy not only for his stratospheric abilities, manipulating the deck as if it were a detachable limb of his body, but also for his shamelessly nerdy credentials: word on the street was he had a PhD in physics. (I've since tried to establish the veracity of that one, but still not sure. In any case, he's well into science). Here was a legend who could combine the life of the mind with the life of the grind - indeed, could embody in his unique brand of skateboarding the very poetics of science I imagined him to espouse. Even if this was more myth than man, the conversation opened the floodgates of nostalgia - but also reminded me that I might have more of a connection with this thing than a mere golden haze could fabricate.
At first I had no intention of reclaiming the gutters from my comfortably parked self. But I was fired to understand a little more about my attraction to the game. What did it reveal about teen me, that I could spend four hours repeating the same trick until I finally stuck something and rode away, with no reward awaiting me other than self-satisfaction, two bags of potato chips, and a mango yoghurt on a good day? And why was I still inexorably drawn to the rolling piece of timber? I thought that there had to be an academically legitimate way (yep, the priorities have shifted) to articulate what I felt. I asked William (London skater) if he knew any academic books on skateboarding, and he ushered me into the relevant channels. But this didn't seem like a field that would lend itself to pretentious over-theorising. While the authors trumpeted 'Of course, the Lefebvrian notion of the production of space is useful here', the skaters they interviewed usually replied 'sick ollie, bra!'. What I did learn about skateboarding discourse, if you wanna (and you do wanna) name it so, is that skateboarders habitually renounce the relevance of anything outside skateboarding to tweak their skater-identity: skating is about skating, the practice, the doing, the landings and the bails. All those little voices of anti-intellectualism were wresting the book from me with one hand, stuffing a board under my arm with the other.
These voices were ultimately imaginary and easily suppressed. The only thing they made me do - in my chronic shit-talking and flirtation with futures never to be realised - was sound off about wanting to start skateboarding again. It took a wealthy philanthropist named Carlos to take me at my empty word and put the plan into practice. We searched for hours on Ebay, scouring cyberspace for its best deals. Scores of brand names, obscure to the majority of the population, came bubbling up from deep in my core, stowed away for years in ominous dormancy: Chocolate, Alien Workshop, Venture, Spitfire, Element, World Ind. - all these names were still much more familiar to me than irregular Greek verbs. Two judicious purchases and four overpriced shoes later, we were back on the street. And we could still - sort of - do it. Our twenty-something bodies felt every creak in every joint, punished every slight stumble with overkill, forbidding bruises. But we pushed through until confident enough to join the Youth down the skatepark. Now Carlos is board-sliding his way to bliss. And I am stressing myself in an attempt to master the complex etiquette and politics of the concrete. But we're getting somewhere.
I can't deny this all must be, at some level, a knee-jerk flight back to infantile silliness, away from a fairly mundane and stressful time in our lives. But the impulse to push off again feels independent of my particular biographical constraints too. Something about this sport chimes with my deep-rooted compulsiveness and monomania. Repeating tricks ad nauseam, slowly gaining proficiency, inching closer to that evasive nose-slide - I forget everything but limbs and board in this supercharged version of my fetish for routine. There is also something (broadly) mathematical about the way board and body carve out lines across the surface, breaking up the flow with brief sharp shifts in angle, ever-updating relations between concrete, metal, timber and flesh. Kids should be taught physics and geometry in their local skatepark. That would be my first initiative as Minister of Ill-conceived Ideas.
Apart from those reflections, most of which could have been lifted from those very pretentious books I recently had the audacity to condemn, I'm also charmed by the ease with which I forget my age on the hard pitch. This healthy oblivion is real release from the growing, and increasingly unavoidable, reminders of adult responsibility: stress, job applications, ever severer hangovers. But yesterday I stood with an eight-year-old kid for a few minutes and showed him how to kick-flip. It didn't feel didactic at all. It was one skater talking to another. Carlos and I only realised how ridiculous we must have looked - two grown men scarred with untended facial hair, kicking it with our pre-pubescent homies - when we got on our more mature forms of transport (cycles) and made the trip back to adulthood. Age distinctions momentarily collapse, at least until your less supple limbs do the same, and your paralysed thighs reassert the kingship of time.
People often ask me whether 'Juvenal' has anything to do with 'juvenile'. Well here you have a moving argument for the connection. If it turns out to be an oncoming train, better to have rolled on into it.
Limping towards the end of my PhD, happily maimed from the most exhausting intellectual and emotional minefield of my life, I was chatting to my sagely supervisor about the wrap-up ahead. I told him I could see light at the end of the tunnel. He responded cheerily with some up-beat lyrics, perhaps reserved for all his purgatorial students twiddling their thumbs in the vestibule of promised freedom: 'Aah, when the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.' That remark could be interpreted by future commentators as something of a downer. But as I giggled my way through the rest of the meeting, gulping down his anecdotes and struggling to stifle my ever-disproportionate laughter along with them, I couldn't help but become increasingly cheered by the image. No new metaphorical slant was making itself available. The image was fine just as it was. I was thrilled by the prospect of an oncoming train.
The enthusiastic welcoming of such future impact is definitely a sign of a PhD on the deathbed. It isn't a depressive or suicidal tick. It's merely an index of profound, gnawing boredom. I'm at a moment in the thesis where I know what my Juvenal will be about. Now I just have to trim his hair, cut his toenails, spray some aftershave in his direction, coax him into his Sunday best, and pack him off to interview - all of which equivalent tasks must be neglected in the real world, of my own body, temporarily, for the sake of getting the little guy off to a good start in this life. Against the monotonies of parenting a word document that cannot speak back to you in anything but the language of your own internal echo-chamber, the sudden rush of adrenalin on finding a light of hope converted last-minute to impending danger beckons as the best thing in the world. Anything that isn't my PhD - even insignificant and meaningless ways of troping my ambivalent future - have become the jewels of tiring days. Any mental distraction feels like the most heaving sigh of a catharsis. Which is why I have forced my recalcitrant mid-twenties body to take up skateboarding - again.
This noble pastime - last waved off when I was sixteen, and it was no longer cool - has now made a surprise comeback, when I am almost twenty-seven, and for that reason it is especially no longer cool. If some wise mentor had sat me down before my time in Cambridge and showed me through their omniscient crystal ball what I would be doing with my last days as a graduate student, I would have shattered it with my hard copy of the Oxford Latin Dictionary and thumbed to the word for 'patently ridicilous'. The only flipping I would be doing would be through weighty tomes. The only grind I would execute would be that of the daily variety, lodged safely in the ethereal surrounds of the library. My reality was now nicely grip-taped: skateboarding long ago cashed in for scholarship.
And yet here I am sealing off four years of mind-slog with regular trips to the local skatepark. Whence and wherefore this sudden regression to teenage recreation? The genesis was inevitably a little different this time. When I was fourteen, I must have picked up a skateboard because, one fatal self-conscious day, everyone in my immediate vicinity was also holding a skateboard. From there came genuine fun, commitment and community, as well as a zen seclusion from the complications of teenhood. This time the approach was much more timid. I met a seriously skating coeval in London a few months ago. We soon converged on the common conversational ground of skateboarding. He told me he did it; I told him I used to. We started waxing lyrical over our mutual admiration for Rodney Mullen, the father of modern street skating. I had always worshipped this guy not only for his stratospheric abilities, manipulating the deck as if it were a detachable limb of his body, but also for his shamelessly nerdy credentials: word on the street was he had a PhD in physics. (I've since tried to establish the veracity of that one, but still not sure. In any case, he's well into science). Here was a legend who could combine the life of the mind with the life of the grind - indeed, could embody in his unique brand of skateboarding the very poetics of science I imagined him to espouse. Even if this was more myth than man, the conversation opened the floodgates of nostalgia - but also reminded me that I might have more of a connection with this thing than a mere golden haze could fabricate.
At first I had no intention of reclaiming the gutters from my comfortably parked self. But I was fired to understand a little more about my attraction to the game. What did it reveal about teen me, that I could spend four hours repeating the same trick until I finally stuck something and rode away, with no reward awaiting me other than self-satisfaction, two bags of potato chips, and a mango yoghurt on a good day? And why was I still inexorably drawn to the rolling piece of timber? I thought that there had to be an academically legitimate way (yep, the priorities have shifted) to articulate what I felt. I asked William (London skater) if he knew any academic books on skateboarding, and he ushered me into the relevant channels. But this didn't seem like a field that would lend itself to pretentious over-theorising. While the authors trumpeted 'Of course, the Lefebvrian notion of the production of space is useful here', the skaters they interviewed usually replied 'sick ollie, bra!'. What I did learn about skateboarding discourse, if you wanna (and you do wanna) name it so, is that skateboarders habitually renounce the relevance of anything outside skateboarding to tweak their skater-identity: skating is about skating, the practice, the doing, the landings and the bails. All those little voices of anti-intellectualism were wresting the book from me with one hand, stuffing a board under my arm with the other.
These voices were ultimately imaginary and easily suppressed. The only thing they made me do - in my chronic shit-talking and flirtation with futures never to be realised - was sound off about wanting to start skateboarding again. It took a wealthy philanthropist named Carlos to take me at my empty word and put the plan into practice. We searched for hours on Ebay, scouring cyberspace for its best deals. Scores of brand names, obscure to the majority of the population, came bubbling up from deep in my core, stowed away for years in ominous dormancy: Chocolate, Alien Workshop, Venture, Spitfire, Element, World Ind. - all these names were still much more familiar to me than irregular Greek verbs. Two judicious purchases and four overpriced shoes later, we were back on the street. And we could still - sort of - do it. Our twenty-something bodies felt every creak in every joint, punished every slight stumble with overkill, forbidding bruises. But we pushed through until confident enough to join the Youth down the skatepark. Now Carlos is board-sliding his way to bliss. And I am stressing myself in an attempt to master the complex etiquette and politics of the concrete. But we're getting somewhere.
I can't deny this all must be, at some level, a knee-jerk flight back to infantile silliness, away from a fairly mundane and stressful time in our lives. But the impulse to push off again feels independent of my particular biographical constraints too. Something about this sport chimes with my deep-rooted compulsiveness and monomania. Repeating tricks ad nauseam, slowly gaining proficiency, inching closer to that evasive nose-slide - I forget everything but limbs and board in this supercharged version of my fetish for routine. There is also something (broadly) mathematical about the way board and body carve out lines across the surface, breaking up the flow with brief sharp shifts in angle, ever-updating relations between concrete, metal, timber and flesh. Kids should be taught physics and geometry in their local skatepark. That would be my first initiative as Minister of Ill-conceived Ideas.
Apart from those reflections, most of which could have been lifted from those very pretentious books I recently had the audacity to condemn, I'm also charmed by the ease with which I forget my age on the hard pitch. This healthy oblivion is real release from the growing, and increasingly unavoidable, reminders of adult responsibility: stress, job applications, ever severer hangovers. But yesterday I stood with an eight-year-old kid for a few minutes and showed him how to kick-flip. It didn't feel didactic at all. It was one skater talking to another. Carlos and I only realised how ridiculous we must have looked - two grown men scarred with untended facial hair, kicking it with our pre-pubescent homies - when we got on our more mature forms of transport (cycles) and made the trip back to adulthood. Age distinctions momentarily collapse, at least until your less supple limbs do the same, and your paralysed thighs reassert the kingship of time.
People often ask me whether 'Juvenal' has anything to do with 'juvenile'. Well here you have a moving argument for the connection. If it turns out to be an oncoming train, better to have rolled on into it.
