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Vice Blog

BRO-ING OUT WITH THE 'BARROW BOYS

Dear Vice,
Me and my mates were working in France last summer. During the day we laboured on building sites in the sun. By night we drank lots of small glasses of lager and hung out with Gypsies. It was a sweet deal. Our job was pretty low responsibility. In fact, we were basically just shifting shit in wheelbarrows. One afternoon my buddy James sort of kickflipped the wheelbarrow up a kerb. Being ex-skateborders who had got fat and lost their balls, we immediately saw the potential in this.

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In the course of an afternoon we filmed pathetic but amusing footage on our phones of us attempting to apply basic skateboarding tricks to a wheelbarrow. When we found a baby skatepark in the nearby town we couldn't not take the 'barrow.

Despite how preposterous we must have looked to the ageing Gallic locals, it was fun and it felt like we were 13 again and sessioning a spot. When we got back to England we spent like an hour editing down the phone footage into a 5 minute YouTube short so our friends could watch it. Almost immediately we got responses from the Extreme Wheelbarrowing Community telling us how shit we were.

I'm not sure what's more bizarre - that we, at the age of 23, had so much fun making asses out of ourselves, or how seriously these guys take playing with their souped-up wheelbarrows. You decide.

Our video:

Pro video: