Ice-Ice-Baby
Bit of a tangent this one, but:

Summer of 1997: I, your debonair narrator is 15 years old, and has managed to get a date with a young lady (lets call her Kate), but is scrabbling for ideas on where to go for aforementioned date. Living in a small village gave the options of going to the park and twisting the swings up, smoking cigarettes, and not much else. Hence a dilemma. I was all for us hanging out in the park (with delirious visions of access to ladybits) but Kate suggested that as some of our other friends were going ice-skating in Coventry we could join them and make a date of it. Fair enough thinks I, I can wow her with my Torville and Deane shtick and then impress her in McDonalds afterwards.

Unfortunately, however, I cannot ice-skate. Luckily, neither can Kate.

We take the bus to Cov, get to the ice-rink, pay, and go and change our shoes for skates. Just after we had come in two rather large Geordies, covered in tattoos, and steaming drunk, had entered with their girlfriends. What two Geordies were doing in a Coventry ice-rink, I have no idea.

The girlfriends got onto the ice at the same time as we did. The Geordies repair to the bar to further refresh themselves in the finest North-East manner.

The ice skating started well, I only fell over a few times, and I caught Kate shyly smiling at me a few times as she also took the odd tumble. We were both going around fairly near to the barrier as we needed some support. This went on for a while.

Enter the Geordies.

Geordie 1 turns to Geordie 2 and, at the top of his voice, suggest that Geordie 2 isn't man enough on skates to impress his woman. Geordie 2 takes issue with this and debates the commitment of Geordie 1 to heterosexuality. Well, says Geordie 1, I bet you can't vault over the barrier and land on your skates to impress your girlfriend! You bet I can, ripostes Geordie 2, I'll show you!

Geordie 2 then leaps over the barrier, his immense beer gut undulating with the effort, his shiny shaven head dripping with perspiration and flushed with alcohol. Miraculously he doesn't catch his legs on the barrier and end up face-planting into the ice.

More miraculously he actually manages to land upright.

Unluckily for him his skates shot in different directions, whilst the beer-sodden mass of the man continued downwards.

His shins broke in almost exactly the same place, splaying outwards about halfway down with a horrible wet cracking sound. He lay on the ice, just in front of me and Kate, stunned, blood leaking out of the holes in his legs, whilst Geordie 1 roundly abused him for not being a man and taking the piss out of him for having broken his legs.

After Kate finished puking in the toilets the remainder of the date actually went quite well.

It put me off ice-skating for life though.
(Zapiola zip-zap-zop, Fri 8 May 2009, 0:26, Reply)