For my 10th birthday I got a real skateboard from my folks, pretty much one of them crappy pennyboards you see everywhere now, but at the time it was the shit, like it had trucks that turned and eurothane wheels and a kick tail and everything, damn it was good. This was a dream for me, because for the previous few months I had been riding a flat plank, with roller skate trucks and wheels that my father had knocked together for me, the major problem with this home made skateboard was that the trucks did not turn when you leaned. Despite this minor hicup I learned to bomb hills on it tic tacing at 20+ mph (it felt a lot faster, I can tell you). Furthermore the only dregs of paint my dad had left in the shed was light blue and a weird mauve colour glossy emulsion, so my skateboard was light blue gloss with a purple stripe, give him credit though, he did have the forethought to throw some sand into the paint as a sort of homemade grip tape, which was seriously grippy (think Mob grip x 100). now given the paint (which was plastered on 1/2inch thick) took 3 days to dry, my first few rides made the souls of my shoes purple.
Now although it sucked and my mates had real skateboards. It did give me a solid grounding for when I eventually badgered my parents enough to part with some of that stuff the adults call money (there wasn’t much of it around) and buy me a "real" skateboard.
This day came on my 10th birthday, and to add a cherry to the cake, I also got my first no brand instamatic camera from Nan and Grandad with a little 30 second delay lever to take selfies with.
You have to realize the times, this was a year before punk rock was a thing, there was no internet no videos, no skate parks, no nothing, the only reference we had available to us was a 1976 skateboarding annual that I’d gotten the Christmas before together with my "unreal" skateboard, so we had to try and work out all the tricks from still pictures, especially the hill bombing tricks like catamarans and coffins etc, in fact at the time the techest tricks in skateboarding were tic tacs, daffys, and walking the plank, It would still be a few years before Rodney Mullen or Alan Gelfand (depending which camp your in on the "who did the first ollie” debate, so to settle it, Alan did an ollie on a transition in 1979, and Rodney did one on flat land in 1981) would leave the ground without curling their toes around the nose and tail for a barefoot "gorilla grip" or hanging on to an "early grab" while flying off a jump ramp or curb.
Well the time had come for me to try something new on my new “real" skateboard, so with the help of my dad we built a ramp, woooaaahh! it was more like a flat bank than a ramp but it was our first obstacle to skate on and it was awesome (and I’m using the word "awesome" here to mean truly "awesome", not like the way kids today use it to mean like "kinda alright" but the old meaning of really fuckin’ AWESOME). Am I sounding like an old cunt now or what...? Well that's probably because I am. Anyway we placed the ramp at the bottom of a hill and went for it. I was up first, now I’d never seen a moving picture of a skateboarder at the time, only still shots, so I had no clue what the fuck I was going to do with this here ramp, so I walked up to the top of the hill and dropped in. As I approached the ramp at about 20mph it hit me, "how the fuck am I going to turn around at the top of this thing?". well that thought didn’t last long as the next thing I knew I was flying through the air clearing about 15 feet and landed flat on my back on the grass verge (you can see how far the grass is in the pic). I was seriously winded, unable to breath and David(middle) and Eliot my 7 year old brother(he's the Idiot on the right there pretending he's crashed off the ramp) were cracking up laughing at me, it wasn’t funny, not for me anyway, but for them, I can see why it was fucking hillarious.
Needless to say this little lesson taught me the correct speed to approach a ramp and we spent the rest of the summer doing simple kick turns on the ramp and loving every minute of it. I was so proud of our ramp I got my camera and attempted to take the first selfie of my life (about 30 years before selfies were a “thing”), now I hate selfies and all the narcissistic shit that goes with them, but on this occasion it was necessary. so I set the camera up pulled the lever and we all got in place for the first shot of our very own ramp, we got in position and waited, “shit, it’s not working”, I ran back toward the camera and "click" it worked!, being an impatient 10 year old I had no clue how long 30 seconds was, it was a long time!. I set it up again, waited like, "forever", and got the shot.
And that’s what you see here. My first selfie. To this day 42 years later you could count on one hand the number of selfies I’ve taken over the whole of my photog/filming career or hobby or whatever you choose to call it. One things for sure, I belong behind the lens, not out in front of it!.
Peace.
P.S. Apparently this must have happened a year after I initially thought, so it was 1977 and It was my 11th birthday not my 10th. and Punk was a thing, but I didn't follow that particular "fashion" until a full year later when I chopped my hair, safety pinned my ripped clothes back together and never wore flares ever again. There, that's settled then! thanks for reading.