The eight-year-old me hated Barbie. My family couldn’t afford the impossibly-proportioned doll that my friends gleefully dressed as an air hostess or housewife. I made do with her cheaper, lumpen British equivalent, Sindy, instead.
And yet I shall be in the queue for the Pepto-Bismal explosion of neon that is the new Barbie movie, starring Margot Robbie as my friends’ brash plastic heroine made real.
What won me over is not that the film stars bare-chested Ryan Gosling, as Barbie’s anatomically-challenged boyfriend Ken, although obviously that is quite a pull. The lure for me is this year’s hottest summer movie features Robbie and Gosling rollerblading, the hobby that saved my life.
It really did. Six years ago in London’s Battersea Park, I was unloading my teenage daughter’s wheelchair to take her for a stroll. Elvi has physical and learning disabilities, it was impossible to find a sport we could do together so we did a lot of walking.
Rollerblading joy in Santa Monica from Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken
In the next disabled bay a man wearing rollerblades was also unloading a wheelchair. Curious, I asked what he was doing. “I’m not abusing the blue badge,” he replied. “I’m part of the charity Wheels And Wheelchairs. We push wheelchair users around the park at speed, would your daughter like to join us?”
That one serendipitous moment transformed our lives. The next weekend we tentatively joined the Wheels And Wheelchairs crew, me wearing rollerblades pushing Elvi with two other skaters pushing me to increase our speed. The sensory rush of racing, with the wind in her face, was like nothing my daughter had experienced. Elvi doesn’t have many words but her excited giggles told me, and the smiling passers-by, this was something she loved.
We’ve been rollerblading ever since. Every Saturday we’re in the park. As my skills and fitness improved we graduated to the Sunday Stroll,150-plus skaters speeding through the streets of London en masse. Elvi and I even participated in the Paris Rolleur Marathon.
Parenting a disabled child is isolating. There are crashing lows of despair and loneliness through lack of support, but skating has given us entry to a community that is as welcoming as it is fun.
The sport attracts a wild cross-section of devotees. The hip hop and Tik Tok crowds love it because it looks great and you can do it to music. But our gang includes a retired barrister and a graphic designer who started skating in her late sixties.
I learned the chap in the car park, Muhayman, is a brain surgeon turned palliative care consultant who swapped running for skating because it had less impact on his knees. Inspired by the 2012 Paralympics, he co-founded Wheels and Wheelchairs.
In 2021 so many people had taken to wheels during the pandemic that the BBC reported a worldwide shortage of skates. Model Liberty Ross, wife of music mogul Jimmy Iovine, reopened Flipper’s trans-Atlantic chain of roller discos last year. Her father, Ian, had managed the glamorous “Studio 54 on wheels” Hollywood club in the 1970s. The StarWash Roller Disco opens in Manchester’s Trafford Centre imminently, just in time for the school holidays.
Sam pushing Elvi on a skate in Battersea Park
Ross says: “You can be really bad at it or really good, but no matter what, you’re smiling when you put your skates on. Roller skating forces you to put your phone away for a few hours, to get into your body and have some fun.”
This summer you’ll find Elvi and me at Flipper’s in Westfield White City or in a cinema watching Barbie. All these years later, it’s incredibly satisfying to finally have something in common with my nemesis.
This article first appeared in The Spectator