Digital Nightmare

THE TERRIBLE COMPANY PRESENTS

• A 2025 TOUR VIDEO
• FILMED AROUND THE WELSH BORDER AND BRISTOL
• STARRING
  • ADE THE TERRIBLE
  • RALPH COOPER 
  • CHRIS MANDER
  • RYAN BRADLEY
  • ALEX “MOOSE” MCGHIE
  • AND INTRODUCING “THE HOMEY”
• GUEST APPEARANCES BY
  • STAN BYRNE
  • PRO MARKY
  • CHARLIE KERR
  • BETH HOWELLS
  • AND CHRIS PULMAN
• DIGITAL NIGHTMARE

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It started with a single, terrifying realisation.

“I’m 40 this year.”

Milestone birthdays take on a very different atmosphere after you turn 30. 10 years ago, I felt the hope and optimism of coming out of my 30’s with major life goals still to come. The Terrible Company was on a bit of a hiatus, because I felt like I didn’t need it anymore. At some point during my 30’s, whilst becoming a Dad, living through a pandemic, seeing my own Dad pass away, feeling my friend group shrink and the lens of my life tighten and lock in, perspectives shift.

Approaching 40, I’ve come to the realisation that I absolutely need The Terrible Company. It’s a connection to my youth that gives me a social life, and it’s a part of my life that reminds me that I went a slightly different route to most other men born in 1985. The Terrible Company is the reason I travelled to Milton Keynes to film my mates skateboarding, and met my wife, and ultimately the reason my daughter exists. If I hadn’t started this stupid skateboarding blog, my life would have been much worse.

So when my 40th birthday was looming, there seemed only one way to kick off the celebrations: An old fashioned skateboard road trip. Back in 2010, a group of us embarked on the first Terribleco tour, Sittin’ On The Toilet, and created a bunch of fond memories of a perfect skateboard trip down to Cornwall. In 2012, we unsuccessfully tried to recreate the magic with My Big Fat Gypsy Road Trip, and whilst bad weather, injuries, extreme tiredness and driving from the arse end of Devon up Sheffield would add stress to that trip, ultimately the nostalgia of that time is strong.

Making a decision to leave our other halves and children behind for 3 days, Chris Mander, Ralph Cooper and myself thought a long weekend with the lads sounded great. Although, perhaps as a reaction to our older, changed outlook on lives, all 3 of us ended up missing our families and perhaps thought that bringing them along for the ride is something we should do next time. After all, our oldest kids have all stepped foot on a skateboard, and in the coming months or years, may decide they want to spend more and more time skating, and in Toby Cooper’s case, he’s already throwing flip tricks down stair sets that outshines his Dad. I think we all realised that we’re “the old guys” now, and the next generation are the focus.

Rounding out our travelling crew was Ryan Bradley and Alex McGhie. Both had joined us for My Big Fat Gypsy Road Trip when they were merely teenagers – now both in their early 30’s, they too were closely approaching being labelled as “old guys”. So it ended up being a convoy of “old guys”, travelling down the M5 to the Welsh Border for 3 days of non-stop skating: the sort of opportunity none of us gets afforded anymore between full time jobs, the school run and the various jobs adults have to do in their spare time.

Day 1

On Day 1, we had some threatening showers on our drive – but arrived at our first stop in Monmouth with warm sun and perfect skies. Having a concrete skatepark all to yourselves in the middle of Summer for hours on end is a rarity at 40, so we made the most of it, hitting all manner of terrain with our best warm up tricks. Some of the best tricks of the weekend went down on this first day, with fresh legs and excitement for the weekend to come giving us a boost to try some cool stuff. 

Monmouth is a weird park: I’d seen photos of it and thought it looked super cool, but as is often the case skating it was a different story. The bowl is a long mini ramp, with a tight double bowl corner at the end. I got a Frontside Air over the hip out of the mini ramp bit and the landing drops you straight into a U-Pipe style setup where you come out of the hip and instantly hit another quarter. The highlight of the park is definitely the street obstacles, with a selection of cool bits and pieces from standard ledges to pole jams, to whippy banks with obstacles to grind over, and big brick banks. The whole thing is very “back and forth” with no circular lines, but there’s a lot of stuff hidden in the layout that you may miss on first inspection.

We made the decision to leave Monmouth after roughly 2 and a half hours, with plenty of daylight left – as our accommodation was 30 minutes away and we wanted some time to get settled in. Luckily, there was a skatepark on site, as we were staying at Camp Hillcrest. Camp Hillcrest is a wonderful AirBnB style site deep in the Forest of Dean, where they have multiple places to stay. We’d booked ourselves into a converted Horsebox, and an accompanying caravan, where we would be stationed for the next 3 days. 

It was a pretty nice little setup, as we had our own shower and compost toilet in the horsebox. The compost toilet was the source of much amusement, because it was literally a hole that opened up into a dark abyss of shit and piss, and some of the others were weirded out by it. Chris almost lost his glasses down there whilst he was standing up for a piss, after which he decided he would do the rest of his urination on the trip sitting down. 

The neighbouring caravan had a lot of random stuff in the shower and the tap water in it was apparently not safe to drink, but it was a decent enough bedroom for Moose and RB to sleep in when they weren’t hanging out in the horsebox. Out of all of the accommodation at Hillcrest, ours was positioned the closest to the skatepark: You literally didn’t need to take more than 10 paces between your front door, and skateable terrain. So in that regard it was perfect.

The danger of having a quality indoor DIY skatepark so close to your accommodation is that it’s all too tempting to have a skate, no matter how tired you are. Camp Hillcrest are quite relaxed about when you can skate – as long as you close the door to the park you can skate as late as you want (Ralph even managed to have a roll at 5am one night when his body was failing to adjust from his normal night shift routine). We finished the weekend pretty shattered, and I would definitely say “skating the park at Camp Hillcrest long after we had tired ourselves out” was part of the reason why.

Our group was, for the most part, pretty interested in “low impact” skateboarding, so the 5 ft bowl at Camp Hillcrest went largely unskated, apart from me and Chris giving it a good old figure of eight pump around occasionally. We had big plans for Saturday and Sunday and didn’t want to go all in on skating the bowl here, when there were far more desirable bowls to be skated. Therefore, Hillcrest ended up being somewhat of a training ground to keep us warmed up for future skateboarding – we still managed to do lots of cool stuff there however!

On the first night, feeling pretty tired from waking up early for the school run and travelling all day, Chris and I both went to sleep pretty early. I had claimed the top bunk in the horsebox all to myself, although after I climbed up there I questioned my decision, as I was roughly 2 ft from the ceiling, and kept accidentally hitting it. Ralph and Chris were lodged into the lower bunk, which was built into what would have been the driver’s seats of the horsebox, so they had a surprising amount of room.

Moose and Ryan stayed up around the fire drinking, with Ralph sticking around for a bit. The fire went on until the rain started at around 1am, and everyone quickly retired for the night. The fire wasn’t the only thing upset by the rain, because it also threw a spanner in the works for Saturday.

Day 2

At some point in the evening before, Moose and RB had befriended and extremely friendly cat, who had chilled out with them and then disappeared into the night. On Saturday morning, whilst I was eating my breakfast, I had spotted this black and white cat about 20 ft away, and the minute it saw me it made a b-line straight for me. It didn’t seem aggressive, so I coaxed it over and it hopped up on the table outside the horsebox and instantly started pawing at me demanding fuss. Listen, we are all propa blokes and that, we don’t get sentimental, ennit… but we would die for that cat, it was the cutest little thing and each one of us would have taken it home if we were allowed. For the best part of the morning this cat got a ton of fuss and cuddles whilst we figured out what we were doing.

Day 2 had originally had some hefty plans. We had bet on the weather being really nice, and wanted to tour 3 of Bristol’s finest parks: The Deaner, Vicky Park and Curbside. When we awoke on Saturday morning, we were bummed out to see that after weeks upon weeks of gorgeous sunshine, the rain had rolled in big time. This meant that The Deaner and Vicky Park were off the table, and there was doubt over whether the undercover DIY spot at Curbside would be dry: even locals in the Bristol area weren’t sure it would be skateable.

Even still, we stuck to our guns. We drove 45 minutes to the centre of Bristol, and then walked 10 minutes to Curbside… To find it was completely dry. As we arrived, I video called Stan Byrne and showed him the state of the place, and he responded with “I’ll be there in 10 minutes”. Pro Marky, Charlie Kerr and Nich Horishny, who weren’t fussed about how dry it was and wanted to just come meet up with us either way, shortly turned up, and then for the next 2 hours we skated a curb, some of the Brunel Way mini ramps, a little bit of the BMX monstrosity that is Curbside, and watched Bristol locals shred the new big mini/vert ramp built by a ragtag group of locals led by Jordan Thackeray. 

Stan was determined to get some clips on the big mini, so still feeling a bit sore from what had been (at this point) a nonstop 24 hour skate session, I filmed him shred. At this point, more folks were turning up, including Ryan Price and Beth Howells, and a band were setting up instruments for a gig. Honestly, for anyone who isn’t familiar with Bristol, this kinda shit happens all the time: you’ll just be at a park or minding your own business, and then a bunch of folks will turn up and just set up for a giant party or something. I love Bristol, and it’s got such a chaotic nature to it, but I strongly believe it’s the sort of place you can only move to and live when you are in your late 20’s/early 30’s, and if you’re like me and need some form of structure in your life, the pure chaos of the place can be overwhelming. Even still, a Bristol skate session is unlike skating anywhere else and it creates the perfect storm.

At some point in the mid afternoon, we were all getting pretty hungry, and wanted to hit a supermarket or get some grub before we headed back to Camp Hillcrest. Hillcrest is in such a remote location that you aren’t likely to get a huge variety of food, so Bristol was our best bet to stock up for the evening, which we did so at a local Aldi. We also took on a recommendation from Alex Walker to hit Pizzarova on North Street – they looked after us and we had some bangin’ pizzas!

When we returned to Camp Hillcrest, despite our legs being wobbly, we still all had a roll at the skatepark. This evolved into perhaps the best session we had at the camp all weekend – we played a game of skate that I somehow didn’t come last in, and everyone put together some sick little lines off the small quarter and the ledge. I even pulled out my old go to transition trick “The Nancy Regan” (a backside slash to fakie variation).

With our bellies full of pizza, we then just snacked on our haul from Aldi during the evening whilst playing copious amounts of ping pong, and watching the lucha libre madness of WWE World’s Collide. It was around this time that Booker T somehow became the “voice” of the road trip, as I started quoting random videos of his WWE commentary, especially when we had been skating the Camp Hillcrest park earlier. 

At around 10 o clock, Chris and I couldn’t stay awake anymore, and had to put a stop to the wrestling watch party to sleep. Moose and RB headed back to the caravan where pretty soon they both went to sleep too. Ralph had already been in bed for an hour by this point, watching videos of random stuff on YouTube before deciding it was time to get some shuteye.

Day 3

During the night, I must have had the best sleep I’ve had in months. I rolled out of bed at 7.30 the next morning. Day 3 saw us pack up our things, as we prepared to journey back home, but not before having one last little skate at Camp Hillcrest’s park, and driving up to Hereford for a halfway stop on the journey home.

After the torrential rain of Saturday, Sunday looked like a mixed bag. There were forecast predictions of rain, although the morning was meant to be sunny. We left Hillcrest at 10.30 with hopes of getting in at least an hour at Hereford before the rain kicked off… But we got incredibly lucky and had no rain at all.

By now, we were all feeling the effects of 3 whole days of skateboarding, but were determined to finish things off with a bang. I absolutely love Hereford skatepark, and at every new addition to the layout, the park has got better and better. The newest stage, designed and built by Daryl Nobbs’ Betongpark, is perhaps the best bit yet, with not only extensive, massive transitions, snakeruns and banks built into the edge of the park, but tiny additions and improvements built into the pre-existing areas. 

Not only that, but the skatepark has an excellent cafe and skateshop on site (big up Boombox Skateshop), who supplied us with coffees and soft drinks to keep us going. The chap running the cafe was out on the park ripping all day, and trying to handle the influx of scooter kids who had invaded the park during the no scooter Sunday Session. This session has run for years, and when the park was smaller, it was much easier for the Boombox folks to clear the scooters off the park, but with the size of the park now, and the parents who waltz onto the skatepark, it’s become much harder to police. Having said that, the sheer size of the park and the way everything is spaced out certainly makes it easier to navigate when it’s packed full of people, so it wasn’t ruining the session at all – until I dodged a scooter kid and slammed right onto my tailbone!

There were no photos of Hereford, so here’s a funny photoshop Ralph did of me bombing a hill.

At some point in the afternoon, Chris Pulman arrived, and I had a nice chat with him – after interviewing him for the blog a few years ago, it was great to meet (and skate) in person, and he continued to show why he rules. As well as Chris, after bumping into her at Curbside the day before, Beth Howells had journeyed up from Bristol on the train with her buddy Charlie. Stan had mentioned something about “maybe meeting at Hereford”, so I predicted we’d see some Bristol presence at the park. Both Chris and Beth are rad human beings and I got some cheeky clips of their shredding into the tour video!

So, with Day 3 complete, we made our ways home, and parted ways after living together for 3 days in a cramped pair of caravans. I’m in no rush to turn 40, and having now had this first part of the celebration, no doubt my actual birthday in September will come around quicker than expected, but I’m glad to have had this time to remember why I enjoy skateboarding so much, and why the friends I’ve made doing this silly hobby are so rad. Cheers everyone, this trip was a banger, and I very much look forward to the next one!