Roller Derby Action

Tabitha, The Builder and I found ourselves, somewhat to our surprise, in a suburb outside of Leicester on Saturday.  Even more to our surprise, we found ourselves actually inside a leisure centre!!!  Rather bizarrely we also found ourselves eating bacon or sausage sandwiches with chips.  Such healthy fare for the cafe inside a leisure centre!!!

Taffa took herself off to the loos.  And there she was accosted by a giant on wheels, bedecked in spangly knickers and a jelly bean hat.  The giant declared herself to be Taffa's sister.  This seemed unlikely.  Taffa's sister is quite small, comparatively speaking, and although sometimes spangly, seldom wears jelly beans and nor does she have wheels instead of feet.

Taffa looked more closely.  It WAS her sister!!!!  Disguised as a wheelie giant!!!!!  Freyja was there to skate in her first ever proper roller derby bout.

In Taffa, The Builder and I went.  And the bout started.  It was all really quite confusing.  We had absolutely no idea what was going on.  Then Simon, Freyja's bloke, and Ian, Freyja's pal turned up and explained the basics to us.  It all started to make a certain amount of sense after that.  And it was a bout made up of two teams of beginner skaters from various different clubs around the country.  It was all rather exciting.  Except that Freyja's team narrowly lost.  But it was still all very exciting.

Then there was an interval, and then there was a second bout which was, apparently, the main bout, with skaters from the home team who were celebrating their first birthday very, very narrowly defeating the visiting Cambridge team.

We all had a good time - especially once we worked out what the point of the game was.  Freyja points out that had I paid any attention at all to anything she had said over the past few weeks I would have known exactly what was going on.  I  did pay attention, I'm sure I did.  It's just that when sport-like things are mentioned my brain sponge turns itself off :-S 

I have done some investigating since so I am au fait with some of the finer points next time we go.  Also - next time I'll take a picnic.  Bacon sandwiches and chips as sold by the greasy cafes in leisure centres did not do my digestion any good at all!!!

You'll find a few, not terribly good, photos here.  And the videos clips I took are on Freyja's Youtube page here (you'll find links to the others down the side).  Freyja is Run Roller Run, number 42, and wearing silver, spangly knickers and a jelly bean crash hat