And how Rodney Mullen saved my life
True, the NHS, or at least some of it, helped keep me alive. I had chemotherapy, major surgery, another operation when the first went badly wrong, and eventually treatment when I developed sepsis. But surviving the mechanics of cancer treatment and surviving everything around it turned out to be two very different things. Once the immediate crisis had passed, I was largely left to work out how to live with what had happened to me.
And one of the key things that gave me the determination to do that was this video. It was a TED Talk by Rodney Mullen, and it literally saved my life.
If you have eighteen minutes, watch the whole thing. If you don’t, the sections on innovation at around 5:30 and creative drive at around 16 minutes are still the ones I would start with. To explain why it mattered quite so much to me, though, I need to go back about thirty years.
Learning to fall
When I was about thirteen, skateboarding arrived in my world. I barely understood the culture, but every now and again I would get hold of a skate magazine and something in those pages made immediate sense to me. It felt heroic and lonely at the same time, but also desperately creative. People were looking at kerbs, ramps, walls and empty pools and seeing possibilities that other people didn’t.
Then there were the boards.
One of the kids at school, William Powell, had a Mike McGill Powell Peralta deck with a skull, a snake coming through its mouth and lightning bolts behind it. I thought it was probably the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen. The fact that his surname was Powell and he had Powell written across this extraordinary American skateboard somehow made it even better.
My dad bought me a skateboard for Christmas that year. It wasn’t a Mike McGill deck, but he then spent an absurd amount of time helping me turn it into something I could be proud of. We stripped the paint off by hand, sanded it, covered the wood in yacht varnish, replaced the grip tape and put a Powell Peralta sticker on it. The bigger problem was that I simply didn’t get much opportunity to practise. Quite often the other kids would be outside skating while I sat behind the glass watching them.
One of the boys in our street had a homemade ramp, probably built by an uncle. Whoever made it undoubtedly meant well, but it was a terrible skateboard ramp. It was too narrow, had almost no transition and ended in a tiny platform with grass behind it. I had watched the other boys attack it for weeks when I finally got my chance.
The tarmac was rough, my wheels were hard and you had to put in one last push close to the bottom if you wanted enough momentum to clear the top. Once you committed, you really committed. I hit the ramp, made it almost all the way up and then discovered that my body had absolutely no idea what to do when the geometry changed. The skateboard carried on and I fell backwards, landing with the middle of my back across the edge of the ramp.
For a while I couldn’t breathe. Eventually I got myself up, retrieved the skateboard and hobbled home. I didn’t tell anyone how badly I had hurt myself because I thought that if I did, I might not be allowed out skating again.
So I dealt with it. I have had pain in that part of my back ever since.
Thirty years later
Fast forward roughly thirty years and I’m standing in Revolution skate park outside Broadstairs with my two boys. I was in my early forties and about 24 stone, roughly 152 kg, which is not exactly the conventional starting physique for somebody deciding to take up skateboarding again.
My sons were learning to skate and I was probably living vicariously through them. While they were doing their thing I wandered into the shop and got chatting to the bloke behind the counter. Somehow I mentioned the Mike McGill deck I had wanted when I was thirteen.
‘Really? We’ve got one of those.’
He pulled out a Powell Peralta Mike McGill deck with exactly the skull and snake graphic I remembered. Thirty years after staring enviously at William Powell’s skateboard, I finally bought one – then I booked lessons.
They were brilliant. I was enormously overweight and very rusty, but I was finally getting the repetitions I had never been able to build as a child and rediscovering the thing I had loved in the first place.
Skateboarding is probably the cheapest way I know of feeling like you can fly. You stand on a small piece of wood and move through space with remarkably little effort, using tiny shifts of weight to change direction while the wheels and bearings run underneath you. When everything works, there is this extraordinary sensation of simply gliding.
However, one of those lessons eventually ended with me falling from somewhere near the top of a nine-foot half-pipe and breaking enough ribs that, for weeks afterwards, it felt as though somebody had dropped a xylophone inside my chest. That accident deserves its own story. For this one, the important thing is what happened next.
Finding Rodney
Around this period I started going much deeper into the skate culture I had only glimpsed as a child. I watched Bones Brigade: An Autobiography with my boys. We watched material about the Z-Boys and started filling in the history behind all those names and graphics I had seen thirty years earlier.
Somewhere in that process I found Rodney Mullen.
He is an extraordinary character even before you get to the skating, and he talks in a way I recognise. His thoughts occasionally seem to arrive faster than the sentences required to contain them, so words and bits of connective tissue disappear and you have to listen carefully enough to reconstruct the thinking. I found him completely compelling – then I found On Getting Up Again.
The idea I carried away from it was beautifully simple. In skateboarding we fall, we get back up, and the process of getting back up shapes us. At the time I thought that was an interesting observation about skating and creativity. I had absolutely no idea how much I was going to need it.
When getting up stopped being a metaphor
Not long afterwards I was diagnosed with stage-three oesophageal cancer.
There is an odd connection back to the half-pipe. After breaking my ribs I had been taking a lot of ibuprofen and experiencing significant back pain. Back pain was hardly novel to me because of the injury I had carried since I was thirteen, so when another kind of back pain appeared I already had an explanation available. Broken ribs. Old damage, nothing to see here, but in retrospect, the thing I should have noticed was the change. Eventually the real explanation emerged.
Cancer.
What followed was savage. The most aggressive chemotherapy regime possible, major surgery, serious complications, another operation to repair what had gone wrong, infection, sepsis and more treatment. At several points I came frighteningly close to dying, while at the same time much of the rest of my life collapsed around me. At its worst, I had to spend two months in hospital with cannulas in both elbows, three 25mm tubes coming out of my side, and a tube up my left nostril to drain fluid from what was left of my stomach, and one up my right to get food in my system into my intestines.
There was a period where they were unable to feed me at all, and I lost nearly 40 kilos in three weeks.
My marriage ended. I lost my home. I eventually lost my job. I lost the team I had spent years building and, with it, most of the people who had functioned as my day-to-day social world.
Even while undergoing chemotherapy I was still working extraordinary hours trying to keep things alive. Looking back, I’m not sure that was heroic. Mostly it seems fucking ridiculous. But I kept doing it because I didn’t know what else to do.
And somewhere in all of that Rodney Mullen kept coming back into my head – fall, get up, fall again, get up again.
The story didn’t magically become easier once the treatment finished. The surgery left me with permanent physical consequences and the aftercare I experienced was astonishingly thin given what had happened to me. Much of what living after oesophageal cancer actually meant, I ended up learning the hard way.
There are parts of that story I am still trying to understand now, but those belong elsewhere. What matters here is simpler. Something enormous had happened to me. I had somehow survived it, and then I had to work out how to keep surviving. Arguably, I shouldn’t still be here. Sometimes it genuinely feels like a fucking miracle that I am.
For a long time I thought resilience meant being unusually strong. I don’t think that anymore. A lot of the time resilience is much less glamorous. It is what happens when you are lying on the ground, you hurt everywhere, nobody appears to be coming to pick you up and staying there is not an acceptable option.
So you get up.
Sometimes because you are brave, sometimes because you are angry, sometimes because you are too stubborn not to, and sometimes because you have absolutely no idea what else to do. Do it enough times and something changes. Getting up stops feeling like an exceptional act of resilience and becomes simply what you do next. That is why Rodney Mullen’s talk still matters so much to me.
Not because it is inspirational, and not because skateboarding provides a neat metaphor for life. It matters because at one of the worst points of mine, this slightly strange, beautifully fragmented man talking about falling off a skateboard gave me a way of understanding what was happening to me.
When I watch it now, I don’t really hear a talk about resilience – I hear a description of how I survived, and it makes me cry tears of both gratitude and pain to this day.
