I have scar on my foot from when I was eight years old. My daddy took me ice-skating. There's something about the cold that makes everything seem so magical; so much better than it otherwise would have been – people skating in hypnotic circles, dancing around each other. The slower skaters always stayed around the edge, with the faster in the centre so that from the sky we must have looked like clean water pouring down the drain. It was an addictive suction that nothing could resist. Not even people. Out on the ice everything is beautiful; clumsy eight-year-olds become graceful just for the night. Clumsy fathers become gentlemen, just for the moment. We stayed there for hours, in the middle of summer, gliding around an ice rink hidden from the glare of reality's sun.

But the shoes didn't fit.

The ice skates – beautiful ice skates – rubbed against my poor feet until they bled, one tender spot that was revisited with every graceful step on the ice. I found that if I kept smiling through it, readjustments of the skates kept to a minimum, winces from the pain locked down deep within a smile, then the gentlemen wouldn't fly away, such geese that they were.

Wise men of wiser tales have said that time eases pain, but mine only grew by the hour. Ice. Ice is the true element that eases such pain; else time would have been given credit as one of the great four. The beauty of the cold is that it makes everything seem so euphoric, so that when a little girl collapses – white boots tainted red, crystal ice turning bloody – though the ice skaters stopped, from the sky the sight must still have been seductive.

So seductive, in fact, that when the ambulance came and the dark blue uniforms revealed themselves, they were no longer a strong enough force to beckon good gentlemen to stay.

In the last days of summer clumsy eight-year-olds are only ever just that, and geese are required to flee – south this year, but perhaps north the next? The destinations stay the same but the place of departure tends to differ. The problem with summer is that nothing is beautiful in the heat, humidity causes desperate eight-year-olds' hair to frizz and now, on her own she is left to admit that no longer are her feet in her possession. Her one night of beauty has taxed her dearly, for what are good gentlemen when their ladies cannot stand but are condemned for an eternity to sit? What good is a bike to a bird, when two wheels move so much slower than wings?