You know what? You look like you'd be good at Derby. You should totally play.

I feel like I left it on a slightly bitter note last time. I didn't mean to, but rewriting it to take the tone out seemed like a hassle. Basically I don't have to interact with dropkicks anymore these days because I'm hardly ever doing dropkick activities, so 'writing people off' as I so eloquently put it isn't something that I've done for a long time. I still get burnt by having higher expectations of people than they are able to carry out but I've made my peace with that. Sometimes people rise to the challenge and I like to encourage people to be better.

My favourite thing is encouraging people to think

So about twelve months ago I ran into a girl at a bar and we spent the better part of an evening talking about a little bit of everything. It was an after party for a Derby game and unsurprisingly, Derby came up at some point. She asked why I hadn't joined up - to be honest, ideally I would have joined up way back in 2008 but I was still recently reborn into the big wide world of Doing Things again and hadn't quite gotten my skates on at that point. Fast forward from there: I started going to Learn to Skate classes in mid July, two weeks before the Freshmeat intake started, then passed my WFTDA skills in November.

Almost immediately after passing my skills test I was staring down the barrel of a three month "holiday" from skating. I couldn't cope with that, not so soon after the high of the discovery and achievements in the sport I was so excited about. It felt like we'd been cut loose for the summer. With Derby fever in my blood, I went straight to a source to get a fix.

I had loved my Freshmeat class and had a fire for skating burning in my belly, so skating with an alternative league who couldn't put their skates down either attracted me like a moth to flame. Their training and coaching style was so different, and the dynamic more open and clear to those standing on the outside of the circle, I felt a tug. I thought I had enjoyed Derby before, and I hadn't even known what I was missing! It was like I'd been eating pastry all this time and suddenly discovered that you could actually have pie instead. There was all this delicious filling that rounded it out and made so much sense.

To a certain extent, I felt like they had been waiting for me. I felt wanted and appreciated all of a sudden, which was strange because one of the things I noted most strongly when I started Freshmeat was the sense of community. This was like the next step - not just the sense of community, but an actual thriving community; undeniable, exciting, determined and fun. Back to the pie analogy, it was like everything about Derby was being filled out for me, it was no longer hollow (and I had thought it was pretty damn amazing even then!)

How could I have thought that it would have been any different? Like the start of all good relationships we both cautiously waited for the other to make the first move. Time forced things forward, and I knew what I had to do. I had promised myself to give Derby 150% this year, to see what I could get out of it (you get what you give). Watching the Wonderbolts.... to not throw my chips in with them would have been cutting myself off at the knees. I was never going to be able to find my potential anywhere else.