Rollerbillies kick December’s ass

December is a drag. Everyone who works in retail is cranky, exhausted, and oppressed by Christmas, and everyone else is busy making more work for the people who work in retail – and training in December sucks if half your team is stuck in the shops. Luckily the Rollerbillies’ Xmas Party was held outside of retailing hours (yes, these do still exist.. barely) and featured Last Gang in Town DJs, sweeties, tinsel, and mince pies hand crafted by Hermaphroditie – unmissable!

With half the team too overwhelmed by festivity to train, we needed to find some other girls to skate with. We figured it would be fun to find the other little groups and make one big group, and it made us feel all full of Christmassy togetherness. First we invited ourselves to train with the Bedford Bandits, and then we invited Bedford and LRG to come skate with us.

Our refs met more refs and got some insight into the complexities of reffing for our scrimmages, and we had fun skating with some old and new friends. The week after it was mainly our fresh meat who were free of Christmas, so they lucked out and got an intensive basic skills session from Kitty, and with the Bandits along too, we got to do some more scrimmaging as well. Yesterday, LRG and Bedford were back, and we racked up an impressive black eye, a gory smack in the nose, and a youchy split lip. We must have been on the nice list.

Thanks to the Bedford Bandits and to LRG for skating with us! And thanks to the London Rockin Rollers for the ace Christmas card. We didn’t send any cards, sorry.. we suck.

X-Ray Bex wins raffle!

And not any old raffle either; the CHRISTMAS QUARREL raffle. X-Ray got the Vivienne of Holloway dress and a Rollerbilly green scarf – score! – but that wasn’t the only good thing that happened on Saturday. The STEAM ROLLERS and the SUFFRA JETS played a blistering hot game of roller derby, and as usual we got to bring some bout virgins along and hear the word awesome used more times than it usually should be in one day. We did tell them that you have to run round the track naked the first time you go to a bout, but our newbies are a bit too clever for us.

It’s getting difficult to decide who to cheer for, but you know we’ve got some loyalties (see below). We’ve seen the Suffra Jets win First Blood with their awesome lineup, so we thought the Steam Rollers could use our shout. And we shouted a lot. The Suffra Jets had obviously spent some time scheming on how to take out Sky Rockit and prevent those high score jams, but she came back stronger and stronger as the game went on. And there was no way the Suffra Jets could have prepared for the awesome relentlessness of Raw Heidi (and nor were we in any way prepared for her awesome karaoke performance at the afterparty; wow, all this for only eight quid?) By the third period the Steam Rollers had narrowed the points gap, but finished the game on 89-103. If only there was a fourth period… It was a hard hitting sixty minutes; we saw some very intelligent violence and we got hit by at least three rollergirls. Quad Ophelia even got a bruise. Awesome.

Unfortunately we didn’t get any pictures of the outstanding Christmas costumes – we were having too much fun to be that journalistically organised. If anyone has a photo of Bandit as Santa which they’d like to see here on the blog, please let us know. We did get a picture of our new ref, aWeSoMe Welles, with the LRG ref team, which was nice since the official photographer asked him to move out of the frame when he was taking our pictures. And we thought he was making it up when he said people are always hating on bladers. Maybe now he’ll get some quads. Despite these minor setbacks, he thought the whole experience was awesome and woke up the next day clutching his bout program and Suffra Jets t-shirt. (Still he refuses to yield to our colour scheme.) Nonetheless, we love him: skating not hating.

As usual, we had a super great day, loved the after party, and only just made the last train back to Romsey Town. We scored a potential new recruit, and may have succeeded in planting the seed of a new league.. we’ll keep you posted on that one. Our fingers are crossed. Oh, and guess what else was awesome?

Get your comment on

It’s been an interesting few days on the Rollerbillies’ blog. Thanks for stopping by to check it out – we’ve enjoyed the comments, the debate, and the spiky blog stats. Free speech sure does keep life interesting; however, if you have a computer-based job it does tend to have a negative impact on your productivity.

I used to think we ought to pay real money and get a website; now I’m glad we were skint and had to get a free blog. They’re ace. If you write one, or if your league has one we don’t know about, tell us; we’d love to add you to our blogroll.

As well as tracking down some derby blogs, we’ve been adding more links for UK leagues; if we’ve managed to neglect yours then (a) get yourselves on the wikipedia list, and (b) shout and we’ll add you. And hey, why not get a blog? You can do it for free on wordpress, blogspot, livejournal, or typepad (none of whom are paying me to say this) and it’s a cakewalk compared to myspace. If you want to capture the evolution of your league, write some commentary on bouts, or if you like licking other people’s pads when they’re not looking and want to tell us about it, get it out there.