You may need to download the latest version of the 
Transcription of audio file:
These skates remind me of my grandfather. Where I come from, Cambridge, there's a long history of skating. In fact I think skating started somewhere round there, on the Fens. The Fens are very low, flat, watery land, so they used to freeze over in the winter. And then people would use it for racing on.
© Science Museum/Science and Society Picture Library
When we were kids we always wanted to skate outside. We used to go to the ice rink but that wasn't so much fun, we thought it would be much more fun to skate outside. So we were always trying to skate on the lake and anywhere we could find. But it never really was that cold, so it wouldn't really freeze over properly.
My grandfather was always saying, 'When I was boy, the whole place used to freeze, I could skate from Cambridge all the way to Ely on the River Cam.' And we said, 'It's not fair, it's never frozen properly', and my mother was always going, 'Don't skate on the lake, it's not frozen properly.' We were always trying to skate on anything that looked even vaguely frozen.
But there was one winter when it was pretty cold and the Fens did freeze up. I had a school friend who lived over there, and she invited me over one day so we could go skating out on the Fens. It was really cool because you could just go for miles and miles, it was like going for a walk with your skates on. We just couldn't believe it.
Those skates weren't like the kind of skates you get at the ice rink, which are really hard and plastic, and hold your ankles straight. Ours were more like boots with skates stuck on them. So they're soft, and when you first put them on you think, 'These are really comfortable.' But then when you actually start trying to skate you realise that you have to lock your ankles, and your ankles just wobble about, and you have to skate in a completely different way. It's like learning to skate all over again.
I don't think these ones here are exactly the ones my grandfather had. These were the ones they had earlier, it's just the skate and you screw it right into the bottom of your work boots. I think he had later ones than that, but he didn't skate any more by the time we were kids. He just gloated about his skating from his childhood.
