Our writer had a head start on the dad in the John Lewis ad: he’d skated a bit back in the day. How hard could it be to get back on a board?
I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to cry. No, not in that way – because of children spending Christmas with people who aren’t their parents, or because of the kindness of those people. I’ve already done that, obviously. This time it’s simply about physical pain, specifically falling on my left wrist. There could be a lesson here, involving wristguards. The bloke in the advert doesn’t have pads, does he? Hence the need for frozen peas. He does have a helmet, though. I have a helmet; later it will save my life, maybe. More lessons.
We’re talking about the new John Lewis advert, obviously, in which a middle-aged man learns to skateboard in order to have common ground with the child he and his wife are fostering, at Christmas time. You’ll have seen it, cried too, perhaps, despite the dreary, slowed-down version of Blink 182’s All the Small Things. It – the ad – is called The Beginner.
