Today Michael, Jess and I went ice skating at Guildford Spectrum, and had a great time. We were discussing on the way there how many times we'd been skating. I clearly win this one. It was through my youth group days that I had the chance to go ice skating. My first experience of the ice was at Silver Blades in Liverpool, a very run down rink which closed soon after we first started going on occasional Saturday outings. It was so run down that the boots you hired were falling apart and the ice was melting around the edges of the rink. I put my ability to skate fairly confidently down to the fact that I learnt at Silver Blades and you had to be good as there was no holding on to the edge with the amount of water to be found there! Later on when we were that bit older we used to go in our cars to Deeside in North Wales to skate, this too was a fairly regular occurrence. And so, for me, ice skating brings happy memories of crazy Waterloo Baptist youth group days out, and I'm extremely grateful for them.