John Hill-Daniel on Rediscovering Skating

I met with John Hill-Daniel in a King’s Heath café, the glass front capturing the light from the sunny October afternoon and creating a lively atmosphere that seemed to have been reflected in all the patrons today. I find John tucked behind a cosy table and offer him an easy smile; our meeting had been marked with some initial mistiming but finally, the day of fate had arrived. 

We were meeting over tea and cakes (Earl Grey for me, Coconut Chai Latte for him) to discuss how he had managed to find himself back on roller skates (eight wheels?) after an extended period away from skating. 

It’s hard to imagine the man sitting across from me doing anything but such after introducing himself as a film editor by day, and a skater, also by day, but accordingly he had stopped due to a battle with chronic fatigue. However, after listening to an episode of our ‘Rolling Out’ podcast, funded by the National Lottery, John decided to reconnect with a passion that had never truly left him. 

Part One - Four Pairs of Skates

John’s relationship with skating can be summarised with four pairs of skates. 

He started skating when he was 8 or 9, “It was in 1980, myself and my brothers and sisters all got a pair of roller boots, we all started skating then until those fell apart”.

What followed was two pairs of skates, both during major life milestones. “I got another pair for my 18th birthday, so then I started skating again until those fell apart… and I got some blades later on when I had young children, so then I'd go skating with them.”

The fourth pair signified a return to skating after a long stint away, but we’d return to that later. 

What made you realise that you love roller skating?

“I think what it comes down to I'm quite self-conscious so I don't like dancing or that sort of physicality, but for some reason when you've got skates on, it designates that you can move anyway you like and it doesn't seem to be a problem” […]

“On skates for some reason, being on wheels, gives me permission to kind of move any way that I want to move, whereas normally I feel like I have to move normally”

Total freedom. He took a sip of his latte as I expressed how I related to that yearning for permission to move freely; I’m sure all of us can recall being at a party hearing a song you love and still feeling too shy to dance. The fear of social rejection robbing us of our individual joys.

To John, total freedom on skates still seems to be a slightly ongoing process, he compares himself to Jam Skaters (they do full dance routines on skates) and how they remind him that he might draw attention to himself. 

“When I see people doing dancing, that's like a very interesting new thing. 

And that might be taking it a bit far from me, I'd start to go into that arena of feeling like, oh, if I do that sort of thing, I'm going to start looking… when I skate I’m very aware that I do dancey things when I skate, but in a quite subtle way.”

John’s social media definitely further asserted this genuine love for skating. Between professional posts showcasing photography and film work, you’ll find homemade skates crafted out of sneakers. He lights up when I mention them and explains how they were his gateway back onto eight wheels. 

“That [the first pair of homemade skates] would have been immediately after listening to the Rolling Out podcast. I wanted to get skating. I had a fall on my rollerblades, and so I kind of got rid of them because I didn't feel comfortable using them anymore, so I didn't have any skates of my own. But what I did have was the trucks from my elder sister's skates, which she got in 1980, so they date that far back. The boots are long gone. The trucks - the plates rather, have been attached to at least three sets of boots since the original ones that they were attached to. And they were attached to a pair of walking boots from my son and he'd used them when he was eight, so they were obviously too small for me. So I just needed to attach something onto these plates so that I could get out and go skating again - and the plates are much too small obviously, they're like teenage-sized.”

He recreates the sizes with his hands, “So it's also 12 or 13-year-old girl's plate length, but my shoe is at least that much longer so it's not so stable – you don't have enough supports at the front, you can't really use the brakes, but I really wanted to get out there and do it again.”

“I was fully intending ‘yes, I'm going to buy some skates, but I don't want to rush into it and I just want to get out there and give it a go, and so, yeah, I hacked those skates together, which is quite a painful process.”

I mean they did look like they were attached to just a normal pair of shoes as well. I thought it was pretty impressive.

“Well, they were attached to my running shoes, and I haven't been running in years and years and years, so running shoes were also really old […]I managed to get the two together and get something that I could skate on.”

This endeavour of fixing teenage sized plates to adult sized shoes could seem like a recipe for disaster, but to me, I see it as a sign of just how much John needed to be back on skates again.

After a small test drive in his kitchen, he describes how he went out into King’s Heath Park for his first skate in many years. Moment of truth. After 10 minutes he was ready to throw in the towel, until another skater, speaker in tow, arrived and joined him for a chat. “I kind of thought, ‘well, I can't go home now. I've got someone to talk to now’”.

“We had a really long interesting conversation touching on health, because I suffer from ME - chronic fatigue - and she suffers from something quite similar (Pots Disease), which I think has a lot of fatigue too. So I had this very interesting and intense kind of conversation, which was just the conversation I needed to have at that point in time. [And] I don't know whether… if I'd have gone home after 10 minutes, I might never have gone back, but because I had this conversation and actually, also I found that after I’d rested I could get up and be ready to go, which surprised me. I didn't expect to be able to do it.”

A nostalgia filled John tells me that he had been back to skate at the park every week since then. Curiously, he never saw that other skater again. “She's kind of taken on the role of a like fairy godmother in my mind and I'm like ‘Was she actually real? Did I actually meet this person?’”

This “fairy godmother” may not have even been real but her impact on him certainly was. 

Part Two – Time on the Ground

Alongside being a film maker, skater, and parent to three children, John has Chronic Fatigue/ME. 

Before getting diagnosed back in 2013 he was a more hands-on filmmaker, working in schools with a variety of different mediums as a creative practitioner. Things came to a head one day in 2013. 

“I just remember kind of feeling worse and worse and then driving home feeling as if like my whole body was vibrating.” 

At the time it appeared to be a virus, but after officially recovering from that bout of illness John has never felt the same since. He describes chronic fatigue as ‘the day before you’re better’. You think you’ll finally get back to 100% tomorrow but that tomorrow just never comes. It’s an apt way of looking at it. The name can be misleading, suggesting a perpetual sense of tiredness while overlooking just how debilitating it can be. Brain fog and aching muscles are some of the listed effects, not even considering the sheer mental stress it can have on someone, making this more hidden chronic illness…”

“I've gotten better at managing it, but it hasn't changed much. I stopped working completely, eventually. It took about nine months of cancelling big projects, and then medium-sized projects, and then in the end I got diagnosed and they said just stop working altogether. So I did that in 2014 and that was really on from a work front, that was it, really. It wasn’t until 2017, which was when I kind of started thinking well- I think I could have a go at doing editing, because I can sit at home and do that, you know it's low energy.”

“But I wouldn't have skated at all over that time and it wouldn't have occurred to me to go out and skate just because…” He pauses, his face overrun with thought.  “There's something about chronic illness in general, whether it's chronic pain or chronic fatigue, that you kind of - you cut out activities, and what everyone tends to do is to cut out the things that they do for fun, and end up with just you. You're just doing the things that you absolutely, you absolutely, have to – that you can’t avoid doing.”

He believes that by limiting yourself to just surviving, you find yourself building a miserable life by design. 

So how does one break out from this? For John it was discovering the Rolling Out Podcast. He saw many parallels between himself and Delroy, from their first pair of skates (red suede with a rainbow on the side) to them both using skating as an activity to bond with their young children. “So there's a lot of parallels in there that made me kind of think ‘oh well, really there's no reason why I shouldn't do this’”

“I've been trying to exercise because I know it's really important to me, but it's so hard when you've got so little energy that you really have to love what you're doing [so you’re not] just there to do it, and I just feel like, oh, this has been staring me in the face for the last however long it is now, 10 years? 12 years? Obviously, this is the exercise I should be doing, because I love doing it!”. 

In a sense, the joy that got him into skating is what brought him back. Besides John is, “far happier with the idea of being a skater than a disabled person”. 

“However good or bad a skater I am, I’m still a skater – I like being a skater”. 

Part Three – Skater Once More

John’s reclamation of his skater identity has come with some changes after such a long stint away. He describes how his health can vary at times, varying just how much skating he can do. He is excited to tell me about how he still manages to keep up his routine, “I would say it's between one and three times a week. There are weeks that I haven't gone out because I haven't felt able to do it. I've just started doing the skate buddies roller skating class, so I've done two of those and missed one so far - the most recent one was last night”. 

Alongside the bodily freedom, skating seems to be a way to escape the rigid expectations of adulthood and maturity. While skating you “leave the world of the adult and enter the world of the child” as John tells me. The opportunity to ask for help to pull off a cool trick, whether it’s learning how to do a cross-turn at 8 years old, or the proper reversing technique at 54, is a small aspect of the sheer welcoming nature of the roller-skating community. Connections are streamlined, hierarchy is disregarded.

One thing that his disability has not affected is enjoyment! If anything, John’s issue is figuring out when and where to reign himself in so that he can still do other things. 

“You get a lot of adrenaline doing it. It's really enjoyable, but when I stop, then it really hits me. I'm like lying down and I’m thinking I should have stopped 10 minutes before! […] So how do I enjoy it? That's really really easy. The hard thing is just stopping being and sensible”

At a point he sits back and pauses, clearly considering something. It seems like you have something on your mind?

“I was just thinking about… When you're in the world of disability, you have to claim a disability benefit for a long time. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about your disability and all the things you can't do. It's really unhealthy, you have to fill in forms all the time describing what you can't do, what's difficult”. 

“It's really unhealthy. It's a really nasty system - It's designed to be nasty so that no one would do it, unless they absolutely have to.” he says, annoyed by the absurdity of it.

His having to interact with the DWP only added further stress to his experience dealing with Chronic Fatigue, and while he is relieved that the issue of claiming benefits is behind him now, I can tell his annoyance is one that is shared with anyone that has ever had to deal with government bureaucracy and tedium. It makes me even more glad that John rediscovered roller skating – there is only so much joy that can be robbed from someone before it is too much to bear. 

Do you think you managed to recapture what made you fall in love with skating in the first place?

The question stops him for a moment. Over the course of our conversation, I’ve learned that it’s hard to quantify the things that make you happy. It takes effort to cling on to them as you grow up, as life gets harder and pressure mounts that you let go of such ‘childish things’.

“I think it's more than that really, with the wisdom of years, I recognise what positive force is for me and how important it is, whereas previously it was just a thing I did for fun, […] now, I was like ‘no, this is the thing I do for fun’”. 

But maybe something you thought you grew out of, or rather, expected yourself to grow out of can have an impact on you far later than you realise. Maybe the sheer act of it making you happy is worth you continuing to do it.

In accepting roller skating as ‘his thing’, it doesn’t look like life can be more than what’s pushed on to you.

I ask what he would do after this, unsurprisingly, he plans to head to the park and get some skating in! Turns out those black sneakers he’s wearing is a covert pair of travel skates, with original 1980s Bauer plates (John tells me that apparently “the skates themselves immediately disintegrated”) ready to be snapped on to the soles!

He's training up to become “the cameraman on skates” and some regulars at the nearby basketball court have become useful targets for filming a moving target. I look forward to seeing how it’ll go. 

He gives me a hug before we part and some encouraging words. 

While finishing my tea earlier, John told me that he still questions what he’s going to do with his life sometimes. He’s never doubtful that skating will still be one of them.