Social ice skating I guess is a typically girlie thing to do. Admittedly there are quite a few guys out there strutting their stuff but for some reason most of the guys I know are just not into it with most of them citing a fear of getting their fingers sliced off as their reason for not coming! So, tonight a bunch of us girls including Rita, Caz, Leah, a few of Rita’s girlfriends and one token male (Werner from Austria not Australia) ventured out to the Natural History Museum.

It’s a beautiful venue for skating with the twinkling fairy lights in the surround trees and the gorgeous building of the museum itself in the background. Quite magical.

For the most part getting our skates was relatively straight-forward though getting served was a bit haphazard with some staff handing out skates only and one member of staff doing the coat/bag checks which made queuing and orderly progression a bit haphazard. The good thing was that the coat/bag check guy was really good and we were able to check in at least four items for the price of one!

The vibrant blue skates for hire were a bit more painful than I’ve had in the past. As usual sizing was a bit of a quandary for me and I had to exchange my size 6 boots (normally I think I’m a UK size 5 in shoes) for a size 7 (fairly easy to do) to get something remotely resembling comfortable. I knew I was in for a world of pain though as soon as I stood up I could already feel an ache in my arches.

We got out on to the ice fairly quickly after the zambonie had done its task of re-melting and smoothing the ice out and it was darn slippery at first. After a very scary wobble when I thought I was going to go down I managed to recover and things after that were fairly smooth sailing. That is, if you don’t count Caz zooming around trying to take us all down! Ha ha. Rita proved to be the expert on the ice with Caz just behind her. Both could seriously motor around the rink whereas I resorted to mainly skating very close to the wall.

Showing once again that the world really is a small place one of Rita’s girlfriend’s girlfriend was a girl who’d gone to school with one of my brothers and who’d been a couple of grades behind me at school so it was good to see and catch up with her.

We all had a great time out on the ice and only one casualty really and that was Caz who took a dive early on. Unfortunately the photographic evidence of this fall was on her camera! LOL

After the ice skating we headed on to Strawberry Moons to dance off more of our energy. We didn’t think it would have a cover charge as we got there for just before 10pm but they were charging £8! It was pretty crowded on the dance floor with lots of Christmas parties and hen does. One group in particular was really getting into it with their very elaborate costumes – Strawberry Moons just seems to attract this type of clientele.