3 sleeps to go - Perry Park, Dutch canals, and skating on thin ice...

I have a memory of skating on the frozen canals of Holland. Of course I haven’t, well not in this life, as that particular memory seems to be a few hundred years old. It’s as clear as the ice I remember skating on though. It’s as if I have lived in one of Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings. Hendrick was born in Amsterdam. He was mute and became known as ‘de Stomme van Kampen, (the mute of Kampen). He was one of the first landscape painters of the brilliant 17th-century Dutch school, specialising in painting Holland in deep winter. I seem to remember him, but how can I? He died in 1654.

Memory is such a strange thing. I remember another afternoon not so long ago - thirty years or so - when the weather was so cold that the park at the end of Derrydown Road flooded with rain and then froze overnight.

Sunday afternoon, Perry Park, the football cancelled and the pitches turned into an ice skating rink. Looking out across hundreds of yards of ice we laced up our skates and went whizzing across on one of those magical afternoons filled with sunshine, laughter and crisp clearness of every kind. The ice was thin, and crackled and cracked as our blades moved over the blue-white surface. There wasn’t any danger, the ice covered only a couple inches of water - nothing to drag us down, no icy depths to drown in below. Back and forth we went, avoiding the edges where the ice was thin and the frosted brown grass poked through.

What an afternoon. A few hours etched into my memory by cold and sunshine and a far too bright jumper – a happy day amidst happy days.

Happiness, like ice though, can so easily melt and the following day the ice had turned to slush. Never again whilst I lived on Derrydown Road did the football field freeze over. Sometimes, like Holland, I wonder if it happened at all.

After the icy afternoon’s skating life continued, but little by little the ice that was slowly creeping around my life became so thin that what lay beneath was not a few inches of water but a bottomless lake of icy coldness. No escape, nor anyone to pull me free. Of course eventually I got myself out. But it took a while and left me colder than I ever was before.

It seems that I’ve spent so much of my life skating on thin ice that I don’t go skating any more. The risks are too great, even though the rewards – the blue sky, the crispness of the air, the whooshing sound of the blades – are high. Like my memory of the Dutch canals and that idyllic afternoon spent skating in Perry Park I only skate in my dreams these days.

Whooosh!