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Spangles, sequins and skates

• Newsnight
• 19 Jan 07, 05:08 PM

Is it the figure of eight? Or perhaps the triple axel? I can never quite decide which is my favourite discipline in the repertoire of ice dance. But I do know that I'm never more alive, more free, than when I'm shimmering across a rink in a spangled catsuit. Some good judges of the terpsichorean arts have been kind enough to describe it as a human glissando.

To date, the medals and sashes that I've been lucky enough to garner must in candour be put down to nothing more than instinct, to flair - to sheer natural talent, if you want to press the point. It's only now, in the light of my Physics AS level studies, that I realise I could have saved myself many a gash and a lost sequin as a prentice skater if I had but paid attention to Isaac Newton!

Expressing myself on the pristine ice-sward at Somerset House in London the other day, I all but clattered into a young man called Nic. He won鈥檛 mind me saying that he isn't entirely at home on a floe. But what Nic lacks in skating savvy he more than makes up for with a fine grasp of the way the laws of motion explain our behaviour on wafer-thin blades. Nic is a member of the Noisemakers, a groovy collective of young scientists.
The Noisemakers' stated aims include promulgating the wonder of physics to a wider public. This is a mission that we at Newsnight readily sign up to. So I was eager to hear Nic explain how, for example, velocity differs from speed. You know - and I know you know - but since Nic was kind enough to elaborate, it goes like this: a skater can proceed at constant speed (measured by the distance he travels over time) while his velocity varies. That's because velocity is a measure of the distance travelled in a particular direction divided by time.
Rapt as I was by Nic's re-telling of the old, old story, I found my mind drifting now and then to the drear task which awaited me. In a matter of days, I had to sit an exam in the first module of my AS level. It was my first academic test of any kind since I qualified for a career in journalism with a hard-bought magna cum laude from a degree mill, now out of business.

Those of you who cherish knowledge for its own sake, as I do, will be delighted to learn that the examination was conducted in exemplarily fashion. Not only were my fellow students and I injuncted against spying on each other's desks, as you'd expect, but we also had to turn in our mobile phones before kick -off. In a further proviso against the outside chance of a cheat in the room, only transparent pencil cases were permitted. On the way to the examination hall, I remembered that I'd left mine in my suite of rooms at Newsnight. I went to a newsagents for a replacement.

Come the opening question and a pressing need to draw a straight line with a set square, I realised too late that my case - albeit unclouded, in the approved manner - was nonetheless sealed airlessly tight with sticky tape. A moment's grapple with this box was all it took for me to know that I could only open it at a cost of being ejected from the room for noisemaking undreamt of by Nic and his cronies.

The geometrical gadgets tantalised me from behind their see-through cover. Sadly, I laid them down, and set about the exam paper using the old skills, essaying my straight line with a pencil and a credit card. I get my results in March.