We went back to the eighties yesterday on a skating trip to Colchester. I’ve not been in years. The last time was about 20 years ago when we used to go to Roller City in Southend at the weekends, drink too much Slush Puppie, get all hot and sweaty and dizzy going around and around the rink and then throw up in the car home home.

It was marvellous.

Roller City has since closed down, which is a shame, but there’s a 3600-member Roller City group on Facebook and some reminiscences on ShrimperZone (the Shrimpers are Southend’s local football club). My favourite, by far:

I remember seeing a poor chap trying to use the urinal on roller skates. He fell over backwards flat on his back mid – flow but couldn’t stop urinating. It was in his hair, and all over his top and trousers. Hilarious.

It’s followed immediately by:

Errrrrrrrrrmmm…….I think that might have been me! Was it on a Saturday after the weekly "Roller Football" game? I was never the best on my feet and I have to admit it must have been pretty funny to watch.

Fortunately nothing so messy happened this weekend as we headed for a secret birthday party at Rollerworld in Colchester which had, amusingly, put the emergency exit at the top of a two-tier metal staircase. I’d like to see 500 skaters tackle that in their rollie-boots.

The birthday girl was Pat, our 65-year-old neighbour, who had no idea where she was going or who would be there, so it was a bit of a surprise when we turned up with Kathryn, Ems and Luke.

Now inevitably having passed 20+ years without any wheels on my shoes I was a bit reluctant at first but found my skating feet surprisingly quickly. Kathryn, unfortunately, found her skating bum just as quickly as she fell over as soon as she ventured off the easy ribbed carpet and onto the much faster, smoother wooden rink.

She spent the rest of the day hobbling. And Sunday.

I’m quite proud of the fact that I actually managed to stay on my wheels for the whole hour and a half and thoroughly enjoyed it. Rather surprising, that, as I found ice skating quite nerve-wracking as I slowly crept around the edge of the rink while Rich pirouetted with the best of them in the middle of the ice.

I think it’s safe to say we’ll be going back. Not for the smell of the chip fat, the inconvenient location or the rather tatty decor (fresh-ish painted mural aside), but for the fun of whizzing around at speed and being a kid again, 20 years after I last threw up a Slush Puppie.

So last week, as part of my boycotting of the London freesheets, I read The Alchemist. It’s not a long book, and I got through it in the space of four days’ tube journeys.

A slightly surprising ending, but one that teaches us to not always assume that the grass is greener wherever you’re not. The one thing that jumped out, though, was this quote from page 138, about two thirds of the way through the book:

‘Everyone on Earth has a treasure that awaits him … We, people’s hearts, seldom say much about those treasures, because people no longer want to go in search of them. We speak of them only to children. Later, we simply let life proceed, in its own direction, towards its own fate. But, unfortunately, very few follow the path laid out for them — the path to their destinies, and to happiness. Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.

‘So, we, their hearts, speak more and more softly. We never stop speaking out, but we begin to hope that our words won’t be heard: we don’t want people to suffer because they don’t follow their hearts.’

It’s as good a justification as has ever been made for not putting off, but grabbing life in both hands and doing today what you’ve always wanted, whatever the consequences, rather than tomorrow, later, or never.

What a lot of fuss has been made over Google Street View. Perhaps I’m only saying that because it’s not taken a picture of my twitching curtains yet. Seems the London spies were warned about the camera car’s approach as it headed up the Westway, though…

I’m boycotting the London papers. Not because they’re full of celebrity drivel or I don’t agree with their politics, but because I’ve come to the conclusion they’re a waste of time, not to mention paper.

I used to pick up The London Paper every night from the guy at Great Portland Street, but a couple of Fridays back I realised that I’d read all of it that I wanted, and did two of the three Sudoku before getting off about 15 minutes later. That’s not good, is it.

So since then I’ve resolved to use tube time, morning and night, to read proper books, which must have been almost as hard hit as rival papers by the arrival of the morning and evening freebies in London and beyond.

Last week, between Tuesday and Friday, I read The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho, which has been on my ‘one day’ list for years. It’s not long – less than 200 pages – and it left me wondering why I’ve left it so long to get started. Yesterday I started Eleven Minutes and, 60 pages in, I’m not missing the papers at all.

There must be potential for a campaign here, to get people off the papers, which have very little in them that you couldn’t get from the Internet when you got to your desk or got home, and get them back into books.

If nothing else, it would be better for the environment and for the litter-filled tubes if there weren’t so many free papers around.

From a BBC press release quoting Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer:

Go4it has done its very best to reach a children’s audience. Barney and the team have done a terrific job in creating some fine programmes – last year’s programme on bereavement was particularly outstanding – but we have to shape the schedule in the best interests of our listeners and we have not been able to find a successful way of putting a programme for children on an adult radio station.

I could have told them that years ago. Go4It always felt like one of those programmes that was only on because it was the BBC and the BBC has to do minority things, so its disappearance from the schedules as of the end of spring won’t be a great surprise.

But just because ‘it’s the BBC’ surely isn’t sufficient justification for putting a programme like Go4It onto a mainstream network like Radio 4 when none of the intended audience is listening. According to The Guardian:

Damazer said that this year Go4it sometimes registered zero listeners from its target four-to-14 age range… The average age of its 450,000 listeners was between 52 and 55, Damazer said.

Far better to hive it off somewhere else. Like online, perhaps.

Of course, Go4It was never aimed at me so perhaps it’s best that I didn’t like it or it would be doing something wrong (or perhaps I would be doing something wrong). It’s like the way I can’t stand Radio 1, but then that’s how it should be – I’m well outside of its target audience.

The difference between Go4It and Radio 1, though, is that you always know – more or less – what you’re going to get when you turn to Radio 1, whereas kids (or more likely their parents) have to remember when Go4It is on and actively tune to it at the right time.

In an age when you can turn to Cbeebies pretty much any time of the day for some Roary the Racing Car or In the Night Garden, its days were clearly numbered.

It was probably doomed from the start.

It won’t be missed.

From today’s Times:

Russia’s entry for the Eurovision song contest was mired in controversy today after a Ukrainian singer was picked to represent the country at the final in Moscow.

The choice of Anastasia Prikhodko and her song Mamo, sung in Russian and Ukrainian, sparked allegations of vote-rigging from one losing finalist and caused angry debate among Russian fans of the contest. (Source: Times)

There would be some delicious irony in a Ukrainian representing Russia this year. The two countries aren’t entirely best of friends, and last year’s contest really should have been won by Ani Lorak, singing for Ukraine, but actually went to a far inferior song from Russia.

This didn’t surprise everyone. Garry Mulholland, writing in The Observer, knew who last year’s winner would be before the show even opened. He was covering the show in host country Serbia:

‘So … you are working at Eurovision?’ [his Belgrade taxi driver asked him]. I confess that I am. ‘Then maybe you can tell me … how come I was told three months before that it was arranged for Russia to win?’

The taxi driver didn’t seem to offer much in the way of evidence, but he was correct, and similar allegations of pre-determined outcomes and cats being let out of bags seem to be a factor this year, too.

Back to today’s story in the Times:

The losing finalist, Valeriya, was seen to storm off the set after the result was announced on Russia’s state-run Channel One television. Her producer Yusif Prigozhin later demanded a re-run of the contest, claiming that he had been told that Ms Prikhodko would win days earlier.

Eurovision is political – it has been for a long time, but not on the level most people claim. Block voting simply doesn’t exist, and the reason that certain national clusters vote for each other is that they come from the same part of the continent and thus like similar sounding music (and know each others’ artists).

The real politics of the contest happens not on the night itself but in the lead-up, like this. And, of course, like Georgia’s controversial 2009 entry ‘We Don’t Wanna Put In’.

When sung, ‘Put In’ sounds like Putin, the Russian Prime Minister who oversaw Russia’s invasion of their country last year.

Two weeks, eh? Time flies. And so do the chickens now. Their new home has given them back their wings and now they positively flap around the place, stretching out their feathery arms in ways they never could before. Not if they didn’t want to slap one of their sisters in the beak, anyway.

And how do they repay you? Gerry crapped in my pocket. Not so nice. I was holding her under my left arm, wearing the green chicken coat with the big flappy pockets and she just dropped one out of the back end, scoring a direct hit. Wouldn’t have been so bad had I not forgotten about it and put my hand in there a couple of hours later.

Nonetheless we still both want to add to the flock. I want a Lavender one, and Rich wants blue eggs, but we’re going to have to try and be good and hold off; we want decent age gaps between them all so that when the older ones go off the boil the younger ones are still healthy layers.

So what have you missed? Well, not much, really. Most of my blogging these days is happening over on Blagger, and the monthly growth proves it. This time last year I was getting 30 or so hits a day. Now it gets up to 1500 and it’s actually paying its own way in advertising (despite the fact it trips its bandwidth limit every month and I have to frequently upgrade to a more expensive package).

At home, I think we’ve both revelled in life getting back to normal. We didn’t have a single weekend since the beginning of the year with nothing planned but this weekend, finally, we do. The flat is sorted – as far as it can be from our point of view – and most of the boxes and bags in the house are either unpacked or safely stored in the loft, and we can start thinking about the things we want to do, rather than the things we need to do. I’ve bought a cheap second-hand bike in need of some TLC which I plan on using to learn bike maintenance. At the moment, though, I’m falling at the first hurdle as I can’t get the pedals off. Fortunately dad is back from France for a while as of tomorrow, so he can help.

And it’s springtime at last.