The team referred to the news pages of the magazine as “Ears”, but the tagline “Communicating Knowledge” was more prominent.

It was always a real struggle assembling the content for this section. Endless hours were spent ringing round to try to extract information from the skate world at large in an age before email, text messages or even widespread use of mobile phones. Communication then was much more painful: it was a relatively closed world.

“Knebworth to Go” was the first story, on the perennial theme of the lack of places to skate. This was a major obsession of the time: we still thought in terms of skateparks and ramps (vert ramps, not minis) and the elevation of street skating was only just a glimmer on the horizon, so news about places to skate filled the first half of the news section. The list now makes it seem like there were ramps springing up all over the place:

• Dublin
• Derby
• Dover
• Shoeburyness
• Stourbridge
• Ellon
• Lakenheath
• Lepton
• Newcastle
• Worcester
• Crawley

There was also confirmation that Livingston was being resurfaced and that coping was to be added to the bowl.

Mad Snoz made got one of his earliest mentions in this issue, but under then name of “Mark Snowball”, and, talking of obscure references, there’s one weird item which is a teaser about Tony Hawk’s impending first visit to Britain. It’s so oblique that I doubt if anyone would have worked out what we were on about.

Other impending events were the Warrington Christmas party, and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Livingston Pure Fun Day and Stupids skate all-dayer at Nottingham University, each of which were going to turn out to be fairly momentous in their different ways..