{"id":755,"date":"2010-01-16T20:55:29","date_gmt":"2010-01-16T20:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2010\/01\/16\/in_which_i_skate_on_thin_ice\/"},"modified":"2010-01-16T20:55:29","modified_gmt":"2010-01-16T20:55:29","slug":"in_which_i_skate_on_thin_ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2010\/01\/16\/in_which_i_skate_on_thin_ice\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I skate on thin ice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain’s recent deep freeze has got me thinking about ice. One could hardly think of anything else during the worst of it, when negotiating one’s way to the Tube was a delicate balancing act on the un-gritted pavements. (Note to my American readership: Britian doesn’t stockpile enough grit to keep all roads and pavements clear, and there is no law that residents must shovel the walk bordering their property. Hence: mayhem.) I found it scientifically interesting that the financial men in suits, who flock each morning to Canada Water station on their daily pilgrimage to Canary Wharf, were the worst affected; something about the slick soles of their buffed Italian leather shoes, perhaps. Ice is a great leveller: it doesn’t matter how tightly you clutch your Prada briefcase \u2013 you’re going to look as ridiculous as the next person with your mincing and skidding.<\/p>\n

\nBut ice isn’t all bad. Personally, I’ve been waiting for six years for the ponds in Russia Dock Woodland to freeze over so I could skate. And at last the day arrived. It was the first morning with temperatures above zero degrees centigrade in nearly a fortnight and the air was fresh with that almost imperceptible mildness your skin can detect when the switch flips. <\/p>\n

\nI’m not an idiot: I wasn’t about to take my life into my hands like the person who left a long, extensive trail of footprints one late (and, one can only assume by the act itself, along with its meandering trajectory) drunken night along the virgin expanse of Greenland Dock<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nThis vast body of water \u2013 deep enough for ocean-going liners in its day \u2013 had been frozen over for about two weeks at that point, but the ice was friable with trapped air and couldn’t have been more that a few inches thick, to judge by the cross-section revealed when some kind soul bashed out a large oval by the Moby Dick for the terns, seagulls, swans, coots, grebes, cormorants and ducks that call the Dock their year-long home. Such a foolhardy act surely qualifies this (dare I guess) gentleman for the At-Risk Survivor category of The Darwin Awards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nNo, I chose my pond carefully \u2013 just three feet deep at the center, therefore braving only the possibility of wet trousers and a bit of humiliation. It was supremely wonderful to skate in a meadow, despite pretty difficult going \u2013 the surface was knobbly and the ice encased twigs, leaves and even a few exploded bulrush heads: where’s that Zamboni when you need it? <\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nphoto credit: rpg<\/em><\/p>\n

\nForward movement and backwards crossover maneuvers were fine, but there was something odd about the consistency of the ice that made it almost impossible to do anything requiring a friction-mediated launch, like a waltz jump or forward spin. Could it be that with the temperature above freezing, the blades of my skates were melting the ice, but the water could not re-freeze behind them? Or perhaps the ice was simply not hard enough for my toe picks to acquire the right purchase? <\/p>\n

\nLooking into it later, the slipperiness of ice is a lot more complicated than I thought. Apparently<\/a> physicists and chemists have shown that the surface of ice has a “quasi-fluid layer” that makes it slippery even when ice skates, shoes or hockey pucks are not applying pressure: in other words, ice is slippery even when we’re not around to play on it. (Forests and trees, anyone?)<\/p>\n

\nI do in some ways sympathize with the urge to trespass upon more dangerous ice: there is a painfully strong allure to an unblemished sheet of gleaming platinum blue stretching in all directions. It’s the sort of pull the ancient Asian race that decided to brace the Bering ice bridge and colonize America might have felt. Maybe it’s just a step in human evolution but, amongst my fellow Rotherhithe residents at least, the urge to throw stuff onto it seems even stronger. There was only one set of footprints on Greenland Dock, but a veritable menagerie of hurled objects: bricks, cans, life rings, bags, bottles, traffic cones, even a Tesco’s shopping trolley.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nIt’s Southwark Council’s fault for paving the local roads in easily prisable bricks<\/em><\/p>\n

\nBut it’s all over now. It’s raining in London, and all of the snow has melted away.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nA snow-cadaver in Bloomsbury, yesterday.<\/em><\/p>\n

\nThe only ice left in town is the stuff I had to scrape yesterday afternoon before departmental cocktails, from the third-floor -80 freezer: a rotating chore that I loathe.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile, out in slightly cooler Zone 2, the ice of Greenland Dock this morning was just a fragile, puddled shell with many incursions of open water for the birds to enjoy. A few of the bricks are hanging in there, half-canted like the Titanic in progress, but I also noticed a number of suspiciously brick-shaped holes. I am happy to see the water again, full of motion and shards of reflected light. I know spring is a long time away, but there are glimmers of it in the air now and it fills me with a secret glow of happiness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Britain’s recent deep freeze has got me thinking about ice. One could hardly think of anything else during the worst of it, when negotiating one’s way to the Tube was a delicate balancing act on the un-gritted pavements. (Note to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}