Everybody falls over: an afternoon on wheels in Arcadia

There is a particular face a child makes in the first thirty seconds on roller skates — arms out, knees locked, eyes fixed on a point about a metre ahead. It is not joy. Joy comes later, usually about twenty minutes after the first fall.

At a recent session in Arcadia we took over a stretch of outdoor court, put down cones, and spent an afternoon getting children upright and then moving. Helmets and pads on everyone. Coaches within arm’s reach of anyone who wanted one there.

Skating is a good teacher because it is honest. You cannot fake balance and you cannot be talked into it — you find it by falling over and standing up until your body works it out. Every child on that court did the same apprenticeship, and every one of them got somewhere by the end.

By the last hour there were children rolling through the cones without looking down. That is the whole of it, really: an ordinary afternoon, a hard skill, and a queue of children who could do something at four o’clock that they could not do at two.