The Tropic of Capricorn

May 01, 2007 @ 12:54 PM

SOMETIME LAST SPRING Ricky Sandström from WE got in touch with the idea to go sniffing around the Spanish islands a little bit. It was all somewhat vague, and I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying because of the wind, and there was a dog barking in the background, but it seemed like he wanted to take his riders to Gran Canaria, Mallorca and Ibiza. WE were working on a travel guide at the time and he was going to bring some people along to get stuff for that as well as it being a skate trip. He brought Pelle, who arrived a few days late. And it all took off from there like a careless Katyusha, as we followed his lead and succumbed to each and every temptation the Spanish nights have to offer.

Gran Canaria was in full swing, when Pelle got off the plane. It’s worth noting that the sun shines on average 360 days a year in Gran Canaria, whereas it shines 30 days in Sweden. Pelle spends most of his time in Sweden, so it’s no surprise that the sun made him a bit soft in the head. The first night there, Pelle took everyone out for dinner and drank himself silly. Martin, the editor of the Swedish skate mag Giftorm and a very agreeable fellow in every way imaginable, had accompanied Pelle to write the text for the travel guide they were doing. That night, the two picked a fight with some old German tourists, whose apartment was below ours. I think the Germans might have been called Nazis at some point and some bottles were possibly hurled back and forth. Martin and Pelle passed out when the sun came up and they were both burned and swollen beyond recognition. That didn’t seem to bother anyone. All in all it was a very positive and inspiring time for us all. In the aftermath, when it dawned to me that the nature of the trip had taken a sharp turn towards the murkier backwaters of human existence, I turned to Martin as the last resort to stand up and be counted as the journalist on the trip. Would he take on the task of submitting to print what we’d been through? He couldn’t do it, the cockroach, because he wasn’t on the trip, he said. And this is a guy who wrote a whole book out of thin air on the subject of street horsing. Surely he wasn’t there either? Besides, I could have sworn he really did briefly appear in Gran Canaria during those fearsome nights that were the start of this strange and terrible saga, which set the We team loose in the Spanish islands In varying compositions and degrees of decay. So as a slight change of Ricky’s original master plan, We did not go to Grand Canaria, Ibiza and Mallorca. Some of them went to Canaries, others went to Mallorca, no one made it to Ibiza and a couple of them never left their house or left it for entirely different reasons unknown to me at this point. In attendance in Gran Canaria were Mika Edin, Lo