Blades

Prologue

Prologue

All of us feel a little lost, sometimes. There will be a day when even that super confident type finds they aren’t sure who they really are, aren’t sure what they want, maybe aren’t sure where they’re coming from, let alone where they’re headed. It doesn’t have to be a big, important day. But it comes, sometimes, to all of us.

      And all of us have our little ways of finding ourselves again, or starting to. Some people write it down to work through it, some people go and sing about it, some people just talk to that person that they know will understand. That way, in time, they will be found.

      On my lost days, I watch a video clip. It isn’t long and, for most people, it wouldn’t be something exactly life-changing. Yet it changed my life when I was seven years old, on an otherwise ordinary summer’s afternoon when my Dad had insisted on watching ‘One Hundred Greatest British Sporting Moments’, because he likes that sort of thing, my Dad. In between the well-spun cricket bowls and the curved football goals and horses charging round and round in circles was something that seemed almost out of place. I remember that it was number forty two – for no particular reason – and that I’d started to get very, very bored. But then on it came: Torvill and Dean skating their Bolero at the 1984 Olympic Games, the highest scoring ice dance ever, if I remember rightly.

      Looking back, it’s weird that I liked it. In so many ways, the seven-year-old me was more boy than girl: always in muddy jeans and halfway up trees and playing at superheroes. I certainly wasn’t the kind of child that you would have expected to be captivated by ice dance, but captivated I was. Something about the speed at which they moved, maybe, but the grace of it, too, and how they were more like one person than two. One creature moving not for the sake of moving, but for the sake of expression. That same afternoon, my Mum asked me what I wanted for my eighth birthday and you can guess what my reply was: to learn to ice skate. I don’t think that I’d expected myself to say it, but once I had I knew that, at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be able to do what those two had done, because it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

      Now, all these years later, I look back knowing that that afternoon, that programme, that short, short clip has made me who I am in so many ways. So when I forget what makes me, me, or don’t know where I’m going – when I’m lost – I watch it.

      And, all at once, I am found.