There can’t be many things more fun than going into a freezing cold skating rink on a hot August day.  Skating was one of Antonia’s educational disasters, and it’s taken her this long to get back into it.  I was glad to see that she at least remembered all that she had managed to learn.  She took skating classes over a year ago, and started out with great enthusiasm having waited (and skated with us) for several years.

Sadly the class did not suit her at all.  The teacher barked at the children constantly, but thought it would make her class fun if she introduced competitive games.  Antonia skated more and more stiffly and defensively.  The last nail in the coffin was when we realised that the whole of the final term would be spent preparing for a huge show.  I couldn’t imagine our daughter performing at all in front of several hundred people.  If anything went wrong at all, I suspect she would freeze or collapse in hysterics.  In any case we weren’t interested in her having that kind of learning experience.  We rather hoped she would learn to skate, and it became clear that learning was over for the year, and repetition was about to set in.  Worse still, the teachers didn’t have the show planned out, and they spent the first couple of lessons in a huddle in a corner of the rink.  Left with not much to do and a tiny area in which to do it, the kids resorted to the type of entertainment we so often find in playgrounds, for the same reasons: teasing, forming of cliques and physical violence.  We quit at that point.

I hope we get to go skating again soon, because I have always enjoyed it.