parklife

I’m walking through the park early this morning following the path the sun lays in bright carpets. I’m going for a swim and runners and dog walkers and bird feeders are out already too.
Victoria Park is a wonderful park that has been the site of countless happy moments. Even today there is a plop in the pond as a small bird submerges and pops up again and it’s a little grebe busy and slightly panicky. A movement to my left, the bare bone trunk of a birch tree is directly caught by the sun’s ascent so the movement seems to make it wink at me. It is a hopping treecreeper and it rounds the trunk where the sun is and is gone.

Following up on Wednesday’s memory, of a time when my daughter was very young, the park then was Queen’s Park. I took Wednesdays off from work and so that was our day together and normally we would head round to the park. She loved running into the birds on the ground and scattering them to the air.
I would sit on the bench and watch her set herself as the pigeons and gulls all pecked away at crumbs then she would toddle-run and there would be a drumroll of wings against the sky and she would flap her way through laughing and raising her knees as if to try and join them in the air.
She wanted to fly and loved the swings to go higher and higher. A game I played was to stand in front of its downward swing and jump out of the way just in time with her kicking out her legs and laughing and shouting “Higher, higher!!”
So I’d push, and this one time I mistimed my jump out of the way and her wee kicking feet caught me with a perfect upper-cut to my chin. I staggered backwards and was dazed, my thoughts scattering like the birds she'd run through. I could hear an echo of her laughing and shouting “Higher, higher!!” but my head was circling and spinning in the air and I found it difficult to orientate myself. When I eventually did her swing had slowed to a slight pendulum and she was looking at me askance.
“Let’s go to the pond and see the swans,” I  managed to say.
She thought a bit and then her joy rushed to seeing the swans so she wanted out and then was off toddle-plodding towards the pond. I turned and realised there was a young mother and a baby sitting on one of the benches and she had seen the whole thing. She had a huge grin on her face and I smiled back like the Stan Laurel I’d been.
My daughter was moving out of my range so I shouted on her and ran after her as she stumbled her way towards scattering the birds to the air once again.