Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: The kids got the gift of some ice time on Saturday night so we bundled off into Smithfield, strapped blades to their feet and pushed them away across the brilliant white floor. They came back of course, but still.

It was all a surprise. We lived in Chicago for a while back in the once upon a time when we were younger and the city there provided a great big ice-skating rink on State Street in the winter.

It being free and we being stingy we pushed the kids off onto the rink plenty of times and sat drinking coffees and watching them narrowly avoid having their flailing limbs severed by lardassed Chicagoans attempting camp figure-of-eight manoeuvres. Fun.

That was Chicago though, where the waterways freeze over most winters and people have a chance to skate. Such things are part of the culture there. In Smithfield we expected to see the winter version of Guernica. Bodies everywhere, a great debris of limbs being pushed around the puddled ice, which would be pink from the mass bloodshed.

Instead all the Paddies and Patricias were skating like they grew up in Saskatchewan. There were young fellas who must never have seen ice except in supermarket fridge-freezers and they were whizzing around pulling sharp turns in front of young ones who responded with graceful pirouettes of indifference. All good fun till somebody loses an eye, we muttered bitterly. You have to hate young people.

Myself, I refrained from skating. Several reasons. Being elderly and infirm there was the fear of falling hard. Worse, the fear of falling hard and creating an embarrassing fissure either in my head or in the ice, the latter of which might require the rink to be closed for repairs as people gave me the hard stare.

Then there were the bad memories. Back in the seventies, while dating a grand young woman from Raheny, I was dragged - not once, mind, but twice - to the premium entertainment novelty of those times, the Rollerdisco in Sardis in Portmarnock.

Southsiders who knew only the sophisticated pleasures of the Bective dance may wish to avert their eyes at this point.

The Rollerdisco was everything you didn't want in a night out if you were gangly and prone to finding your legs wrapped around each other like twined pipe-cleaners. It was also everything you didn't want if you were a boy subject to the desires of adolescence. There were no lurches, just those periods you spent clinging to the shoulders of your giggling partner as you attempted to stop the floor coming up to meet your face.

The Rollerdisco deprived you of your winklepicker shoes and got the seat of your white trousers dirty. The Rollerdisco deprived you of everything you needed as a young man with bad intentions. It deprived you of your health, your dignity and the free use of your hands.

It was a period when being a male at a disco you were obliged at some stage to remove your jacket and twirl it over your head, thus making yourself look like a centaur - half helicopter, half Elvis. You twirled and you also twitched your body in approximate time to the music. This was what we called nigh' fevah, nigh' fevaaaaah. Yes, we had a way to do it.

Nigh' fevaaaah manoeuvres could be mastered with practice. Rollerskating just couldn't. We had no way to do it.

The chief diversion of the grand young woman from Raheny was to prise my fingers from the perimeter wall, or her shoulders, and face me towards the other end of the rink. Then she'd lean into the small of my back and push me off like a bobsled.

I had an idea that if I fell, some callous rollerskater would remove my fingers while skating by, so I kept my limbs and hands tucked in tight like an alpine skier. Even when I tumbled over I went down rigid, like a Baghdad statue.

Eventually it got to the stage where my date could shove me the length of the rink and until somebody hit me a passing glance or I skated over a cigarette butt I could sail through Sardis with the elegance of a shopping trolley being blown around a supermarket carpark.

Occasionally people would skate along beside me pretending to brush the floor in front of me, as in the sport of curling. Not really. Things weren't that droll in Sardis in the seventies.

I think myself and the Raheny woman broke up after our second visit to Sardis. A relationship has no future when one partner has all the testosterone and none of the dignity.

It struck me on Saturday night though that the world has changed. All those prissy little prohibitionists who scutter about the place warning us about drinking and smoking have never done a damn thing to provide us with any other form of winter entertainment.

In my day it was drinking, smoking and shifting that you did on weekend nights and 200 years on it's the same prescription for getting through youth. Some blurred years and then a mortgage.

That's why seeing Irish people ice-skating on a Saturday night was such a thorough shock. At last a new way to bump into the other sex. The young fellas looked as suave as Cary Grant.

If we keep using the aerosol sprays and if the earth holds to its part of the deal on the global warming thing, we should soon be having very cold winters and tropical summers. Our entire sporting culture will be adapted; we'll skate on the Liffey and surf off Dollymount.

And we'll get better sports books too. With few exceptions, books about the GAA never actually capture its cultural importance. The books are all about who slapped who and who left the club when their family was insulted and who is a bigger fecker than you'd think.

Meanwhile, there is a great, living canon of fine books to be had about ice hockey and ice skating and the broad pastimes of slipping and sliding.

In fact my theory has been that with this climate-prompted shift in our behaviour patterns we will get a big improvement in the general standard of our literature as a whole. No more books about dark, drink-soaked depressives standing on the edges of dark, forbiddingly moonlit lakes on dark rainy nights before they walk into a dark drowning depth in order to escape the memories/the family/RTÉ's new reality show where you win a house in Mullingar.

The lake will be frozen and fringed with fairy lights and there'll be people roasting chestnuts on the bank and there'll be a carousel and nearby men will be fishing for mullet through holes in the Tolka and there'll be some winter hurling to be played with an orange sliotar on the crisp snow tomorrow and there'll be some spotty genius just skating around in circles all night thinking of what happy nothings he's going to write when he gets in close to the warm glow of the laptop. He'd be like the 03 team in the Sindo except that he'd wear warm clothes.

That thought sort of sobered me up.So I came home on Saturday night and got stuck into Ken Dryden, the bard of ice hockey.

"Somewhere in our souls," he said, "is a spiritual Canada. Most probably its bedrock is of snow and ice, winter and the land. And if we were to penetrate it a little deeper, chances are we would find a game."

And then I thought that, yes, somewhere in our souls too is a spiritual Canada or a damp version of the same. So yesterday I headed out to see some winter hurling. And I found it on a bedrock of mud and grass. It was so good that I decided never to bother with deodorising sprays ever again. Suits us being tight-lipped and damp.

Bah, forget the frozen lakes and the rinks, let the 03s and the Cary Grants suffer in rollerdiscos and winklepickers like their parents and their parents' parents before them.

I'm telling you, unless you begrudge them their bloody youth they won't thank you later.