Severe winters are still very rare, the week of snow and frost that we have experienced this year should not have a name.
For really cold winters we have to dig a little back into history.. In my opinion, cold winters with skating opportunities were a lot more common in my young youth.. And so began my skating career. Near our house, really a few hundred meters away, lay Het Ijzeren Kind', a puddle that was created by the sand extraction for housing in Hintham-South.
Today, such a puddle rarely freezes, in my youth it happened almost every year. That offered opportunities!
Skates were happy in the house, and those things always fit, according to my parents. It was skates that you could just tie under your shoe, so called 'bones'.
Fine anyway? That always worked, yeah??
Unfortunately, reality was a tad less rosy. First of all, you had to be able to lay firm knots for that undertying. As a child, I did not manage that well enough, after sale the skates were more beside my feet than underneath them. The advantage of this is that you are less likely to go snooping, but of course it does not skate for a meter. Second, those things were “not in a hundred years” sharpened, so so blunt that the name “bones” was completely correct.
Eventually there were other skates when I was a little older. Although I have always been a fan of skating competitions on television, I myself have never gotten any further than a little scribble. My very first skates, those bones, I still have (see header photo). A memento of my childhood, shall we say...
(c) 2021 Hans van Gemert
