HEADLINE THINGY
This is the standfirst what says what is what and that and has names of people DONE BIGGLY plus all kinds of other stuff blah blah say three lines worth of 12-point type that’s what this is oh yes indeed. Hello hello hello and so on and so forth. Despite having lived in Brighton for three years whilst doing the world’s most pointless degree (English and Film Studies at Sussex), I didn’t actually ‘get into’ derby until I’d moved back to London. I’d heard of the Brighton Rockers, and was impressed by the high calibre of punning in the team-names (Chariot Sophia? Chaka Carnage? These are my kind of people), but hadn’t seen it in action. I got the bug, though. And the bug got more intense after I bumped into the London Roller Girls on a flight to Berlin and they told me it was several different kinds of awesome. So after months of going “ooh that looks interesting”, my bug developed into a full-blown derby addiction: I spent hours watching jams on YouTube, came up with hundreds of pun-tastic derby names for myself, and trundled round and round Dulwich Park in the rain trying to break in my new roller-skates (which is a terrible idea, for the record.) I had visions of my low centre of gravity and hefty backside coming in useful, speeding around the track like a sparkly bullet leaving the opposing team to cough on my dust. Kids wear roller-skates. How hard could it be? Imagine having a game of Twister with Ryan Gosling on Space Mountain. Roller derby is more fun than that. After three weeks, I’ve made so many new friends I’ve lost count. Although starting any new sport can be scary – especially when you see just how fast those big girls go, and feeling like you’ll never be that cool – it stops being intimidating and becomes ludicrously funny when there’s two of you trying to hold a conversation with gumshields in. The more seasoned members of the league – Daylight Throbbery, Angel DDelight and Gin Atomic, amongst others - were very sympathetic considering just exactly how crap we all must have been. Skidding off track at full speed and crashing onto the floor for what felt like the hundredth time, I felt a flash of panic – had I felt my thumb crack? Did it
look slightly off-centre compared to the other one? Would I ever play piano again? “That looks like it’s going blue,” remarked Daylight Throbbery, in the exact tone of voice my mum uses when saying “this cardigan would look nice on you.” Through some miracle, and despite my impressive show of whimpering and holding an ice-pack to my thumb (which has made a miraculous recovery), I got accepted into the training programme – which means that I will now spend five hours a week learning how to make someone fall on their face using only my right hip. I’m no sports-dodger by any means – I have two silver medals for fencing, which I let myself gloat about twice a year. But I’ve never, ever been part of a sport where I’ve leapt out of bed first thing in the morning just to do the exercises. I do those planks every single damn day. I accumulate hours in derby stance. I’ve only done it for a few weeks and already I feel more disciplined and more dedicated than I’ve ever felt in my life. I’ve even started doing pilates, for god’s sake. Do yourself a favour – buy a crappy pair of rollerskates and some all-important pads and get thee to your local fresh meat trials. Or, failing that, go and see a bout – and bring a spare pair of knickers.