The torrential rain of the last few weeks has fucked over quite a few people, with houses getting evacuated and people canoeing their way up the High Street.
Seeing my old hometown of Abingdon, Oxfordshire on the news last with people inches away from having their shagpile carpet ruined was a bit shocking. Reports from the brand new, less than two weeks old skatepark, cleverly built on the Thames floodplain, seem to show a different story. Expecting that the already pretty minimal skatescene would have been washed away, it seems that if anything, it has strengthened it. Abingdon local, Jono Wyborn, sent this report from the new park to us this morning:
“Although the skatepark itself is dry, the area around it is more like the Florida everglades than an English field in summer. The water surrounds the park, and has claimed the life of a couple of boards, including my own which now feels like its-not-made-from-wheat-made-from-oats-instead-abix.
The water is not completely bad news though, the Abingdon skate scene has not suffered, and in someways the water has added to the session, its all about powerslides, not switch coffin grinds kids.
So yeah, skateboarding is even more fun down the park now, one of the recent favourites was playing a mass game of skate, and the loser has to sit in the water for a minute!
It is also quite fun to challenge people to do tricks near the water, ” Go on Nick, front rock on that quarter” knowing that there is a possibility of his board going in the water! Incredibly harsh, but quite amusing at the same time.
Flooding is gay.
The park was two inches underwater on Sunday, didn’t think it was possible for that much to dry that quickly (we skated there Sunday night)
Finally but definitely not the least important point: I was blessed with seeing a fat ginger kid slide off his BMX because of a little puddle at the bottom of the BMX jump thing. God has returned to his routes and is using the Noah and the Ark method to clear away the evil! The evil in this case being a fat ginger BMXer!”
Photos: Jono Wyborn