"SECOND GENERATION OLD SKOOL"
by Jon "Spooky"Parsons

Milford Haven, in Pembrokeshire, West Wales (next stop Ireland), has had an outdoor swimming pool since the sixties, it¹s use declining in the mid-eighties culminating in it being emptied out over winter until one year in the early nineties it just never got re-filled (but that¹s another, and somebody else¹s story)...

We started skating it in the mid eighties when it was still being filled for summer swimming, high-diving, clandestine night-swimming and amorous encounters with teenage girls - and left emptied and un-manned over winter.

I¹d skated for a few years previous but began to get more serious around Œ82-¹85, when skating and punk music, my other love, began to evolve together (or certainly that¹s how it seemed to me). Transworld Skateboarding and Thrasher magazine, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains...the Bones Brigade - a young, stick-like Tony Hawk...

A small crew of myself, Simon Harper, Peanuts, Anthony Sheehan, Ian Kimber and Owen Llewellyn when he came home on occasion from London with some new trick he¹d learnt and a few others whose names and faces blur over the years, would regularly skate the pool, spurring each other on to ride or ollie off the edge then take the 5ft vertical drop into the shallow end (at the cost of a few boards, but amazingly no major injuries, though I still have the elbow and knee scars from those sessions).

When the council stopped filling the pool for summer it was ours full-time. I say "ours" but we'd regularly get chased out by the police (to this day and as an adult I can¹t really think of ONE good reason - we weren¹t really bothering anyone or doing any damage) only to re-appear and carry on skating as soon as they¹d driven off.

We had a couple of summers of full use of the pool, to the point where we used to leave a broom down there to clear the gravel and "stop-you-dead" stones. The "plug" was the other killer, situated slap bang in the middle of the deep end - literally a 2 foot diameter plug - like cutting a 2 foot hole in the centre of your half pipe and slapping a manhole cover over it!!!

One winter storm knocked down a few of the wooden fence panels, which we then incoporated into our sessions. There were no skate facilities around locally at the time and none of us had transport so our pool was a skate heaven, even though at the time we longed for a round bowl with proper curve and vert...

The usual happened, everyone drifts away for the usual teenage reasons and after skating solo for a while (and working with a couple of surfers) I ventured into the wet stuff and loved it! I surfed and skated for a while but I eventually flogged all my pads (but not my board) thinking I wouldn¹t need them again.

I¹ve surfed from then till now, not as regularly now - our waves are best in the winter and as I get older, getting naked in January outside the car in driving rain, followed by a half-hour paddle through the white stuff (while someone pours buckets of ice over your head) holds less appeal than it did as a twenty something... I used to think it was "hardcore, now it's just "fucking cold!!!"

Fast forward... wife, kid, surfing weekends...

Anyway, to cut a long and probably boring story a bit shorter, towards the end of 2002 I decided to get myself a cheap longboard of the wheeled variety.

I'd never ridden a longboard before but everything about skating just came back, the joy of wheels on concrete, long downhill runs (and my surfing had definitely improved my board style if not my skill!) ...

I guessed I was having a mid-life crisis of some sort (but better this than taking up golf!!!!) and the only skaters around here (that I know of) are youngsters.

I upped my board after about a month (via Lush Longboards) and sold my old one to my brother-in-law. It¹s been downhill (no pun intended) from there... dug out my old 32x 10 pool board (for my four year old son to se???!!!),
bought a new shorty for myself having discovered that during my absence the councils/housing associations had slapped up half-pipes everywhere!! Three within half hour drive, the nearest 2 mins away!!!

Dislocating my collar bone on my longboard slowed me down a bit, but I was back (tentatively at first) a couple of weeks later (albeit with a bloody asymmetrical shoulder line - I'll post pics, it¹s gnarly!??!)

(INTERLUDE)
Scene - long, steep, curving downhill road in Milford... "You go from there then... I'm going from the top...
Speed picks up, do a powerslide, speed picks up again, do the second - looking good - the third slide ends
with me slamming at speed, losing a Van, a glove and rolling into the hedge...

I got up a bit disoriented (I'd banged my head - YES, now I wear a helmet!!!), hopping on one Van, holding my shoulder...

"Fuck that hurts, ow, fuck that hurts, ow....(While doing the pain dance...)

My brother-in-law starts looking at my shoulder funny... "What?""I don¹t think that should be sticking out like that.." I look at my right shoulder, he¹s not joking...

Next stop - Casualty. Bad dislocation and minor concussion."We could operate but you might get some nerve damage...""Great". They decide to leave it and see how I go (NHS cutbacks anyone?), I get nearly full use back after a month or so (well enough to skate after a couple of weeks)...

Just throbs like hell when I walk through the freezer section in Tesco...

(INTERLUDE ENDS)

Anyway, my visits to the Lush Longboards site led me here, where I discovered that I WAS NOT ALONE...

... in the sticks somewhere, another old bastard is picking up a board, thinking he¹s alone... thinking the kids are much better these days and they¹re all gonna laugh at him... noticing that there are half-pipes everywhere...

...and eventually he'll find him(or her) self here... ...Mom, I'm home...

Carl and the MAS boys, to paraphrase Kevin Costner in that crap baseball film - "If you build it they will come..."

You built it and they came. Skate on gnarly middle-aged dudes... you¹re bound to have a whole new generation of MAS soon when WE get too battered and broken...

JULY 2003

(PS. The council buried our pool, much to local protest - it¹s now filled in with a rockery and "water garden"... a future generation of skaters might dig it out one day...)