BIG INTERVIEW: Yes I’m a girl... I’m a skateboard girl

MUM and dad are very much people that want us to be girls – girly girls,” said Diana Kirk, one of three sisters.

“I had horse riding lessons and nice stuff that young girls do. Mum didn’t want me playing football.

“I remember the neighbours across the road giving me an old skateboard and me making ramps in the garden that mum didn’t approve of, but I was a proper tomboy at heart.”

The skateboard was made of plastic, had hard wheels and was probably a leftover from the first British skateboarding mania in the late 1970s. These days they’re known as Penny Boards and sometimes the parents of young customers at ATB Skate Warehouse reminisce about having them as children.

The tomboy was about nine, and would take up mountain boarding – a type of all-terrain skateboarding – in her late teens after meeting her future husband.

In 2002 and 2004 she would take the British women’s downhill championship.

Diana is originally from Cwrtnewydd, a village in rural South Wales. Her parents ran a garage there but the family came to Swindon when Diana was five, after the 1980s version of austerity hit the local economy.

Diana has always loved sport, in spite of having a painful medical condition called Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP).

“My cells attack my platelets and I can bruise really easily, so if I have a large impact or if I walk into something it and have a big bruise it will then be triggered and look as if I’ve been in a horrific car accident.

“My husband and I joke about turning Friesian because sometimes my legs look like a cow-print, if that makes sense. It’s mostly on my legs.

“At 13 I had a really bad bout of it and ended up in hospital. Mum and dad were a little bit worried about taking me to hospital at the time. Because I was covered in bruises they were worried that the hospital would think they were attacking me. School was questioning where the bruises came from. I spent a week poorly in hospital.

“I would have very bad nosebleeds that would last for hours. I’d go through boxes of Kleenex to try and stop them.”

In spite of the illness, she loves the thrill of downhill sports in particular.

“We went snowboarding at Christmas. I went through what I thought were some woods and it went really, really narrow. I had to go across a stream on my snowboard over a plank of wood.

“If I had known it was there I wouldn’t have done it because you get to a certain age and you want to play it safe and do all the nice stuff that you enjoy, and where you know there’s lots of room to manoeuvre if things go wrong.

“So I went through these woods and had to go across this plank of wood very quickly. If I’d fallen in or hit a tree it would have been very painful. And then, when I came out of the other side through the woods I was like, ‘Yeah! That was amazing – let’s do it again!’

“Obviously I didn’t because I’m not an idiot and I would have fallen off the second time.

“I’ve never done drugs and I can’t really drink because of my ITP because that’s one of the things you’re not allowed to do, so that’s for me. That’s my little rush, that’s my buzz. I don’t need to do all that other stuff.”

ATB started as a mail order business run by Stuart, then moved to a shop in Faringdon Road – and then to a bigger one in Faringdon Road.

Then came the scooter boom.

“We made a lot of money from that and we wanted to give something to the community so we set this place up. It’s going to be five years in October.”

As well as having the only indoor skate park in Swindon, ATB sells skateboards, snowboards, scooters, components for self-builders, safety gear and various other items. Customers range from children to veterans in their forties, fifties and older.

The business is also behind an ongoing campaign to save the nearby Oasis outdoor skate park from redevelopment, even though the outdoor park is technically a rival.

“A lot of people say to me, ‘You’ve got your own business here – you want people to come in and use the skate park. Why do you want to save that rubbishy skate park out the back?’

“That divides the skateboard community because you get the rich kids who’ve got the cars and can drive to any skate park across the UK and they say, ‘We don’t need it in Swindon.’ But they don’t understand that losing that skate park is a really sad thing.

“It’s really important to protect something like that because it’s a free activity for kids to do. It’s out of the way, it’s not near any homes, it’s not near where they can annoy someone.”

Diana and Stuart are proud that ATB was chosen as the venue for the UK leg of the Element Make It Count competition.

“It’s normally held in a city. It’s been held in Nottingham, Manchester, London, so for Swindon to be chosen is a really big deal.

“When we were asked we didn’t even draw breath – we were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it, we’ll do it!’”

Diana is a strong advocate of skateboarding and similar sports not just as fun but also as a way of keeping fit.

“I love it because when the kids come out here they’re absolutely sweating. They say, ‘Oh, I could do another hour.’ The exercise is brilliant and the parents think it’s fantastic. The kids often will spend hours here.

“The nice thing is that all these sports have such a great community behind them and it doesn’t matter if yo are rich or poor. You could be on the naffest scooter pulling the best tricks.”

Diana has a blog at dianavonkirk.com, and the ATB website is www.atbshop.co.uk