When lockdown began, many people were confused about what the next few months had in store. Not me: as parent to a five-year-old and a two-year-old (both boys, both loud) and resident of a flat with no garden, it was very clear what I would be doing each and every day throughout the indefinite societal hiatus. With the schools, nurseries, cinemas, soft play, playgrounds, leisure centres, National Trust properties, shops and all access to grandparents gone, there was now only one game left in town: going to the park.
I like my local park. Once part of a Victorian estate in Beckenham in far-flung south-east London (David Bowie grew up nearby), Kelsey Park is by some distance the fanciest one I have ever lived near, with a big lake in the middle of it, a truly world-beating selection of birdlife – herons! Cormorants! – and full of huge, gnarly, weird trees. It is locally popular, but fundamentally obscure, meaning there was never at any point the sense it might be shut down due to excessive busyness like the more famous parks of central London. It’s a really good park.
Nonetheless, up to this point “going to the park” had effectively meant “going to the playground and maybe the cafe”, neither now options. The idea of simply hanging out in a park in the name of exercise sounded suspiciously like it might soon get old. What were we actually going to do every day? And I really do mean every day: a week after lockdown I was abruptly furloughed and thus became the designated daycarer. My wife needed as much peace as possible to crack on with her full-time job, and the furious online selling spree she’d embarked upon on the side, reasoning that if we were all going to be cooped up permanently, she might as well flog off some of our accumulated tat.
The first thing we did was take a ball to the park. The two-year-old immediately threw it into the lake, in an effort to feed it to some confused geese. The next day he threw our other ball into the lake. The day after that my wife used her PayPal account to quickly pay for four much larger balls, which have so far not been fed to the birds. She also ordered some new bikes. But man cannot live on balls and bikes alone, and trying to simultaneously train two children to cycle, in a park you’re not supposed to bike in, has obvious problems.
Instead we ended up deciding to explore the whole park. As in, really explore it. There wasn’t exactly a plan but, like a budget Shackleton expedition, we began things at the tail of winter by stomping through the undergrowth at the park’s quiet top end, and sort of moved stealthily south as the year wore on.
The first discovery we made was a weird brick igloo near the park’s far entrance, which Google suggested was a Victorian ice store that now served as a bat sanctuary. If it didn’t quite have the functional pizzazz of a climbing frame – literally, imagine an igloo made of bricks – it more or less served the same role for a week or two, before we moved on and left the bats in blessed peace.
As it turns out, a park changes quite a lot with the seasons: daffodils and buttercups erupted in early spring, blizzards of cherry blossom swirled through it on some rare blustery days in early April, and there’s the constant flux of the copiously breeding waterfowl. Who needs the theatre when you can emotionally invest in the latest generation of Egyptian goslings? We discovered hidden trails littered with huge, rotting trees; we found a way to the bottom of some posh gardens adjoining the park, and gazed at their beauty.
Much of our time was spent climbing over trees and gawping at birds, and after a few weeks of me trying to describe what we’d seen to my wife, she ordered some books to help us identify everything.
We discovered that one of the kids’ favourite play spots is, it turns out, under a huge Bhutan pine, presumably planted by the old estate owner in an act of Victorian whimsy. One day I identified a grey wagtail, and it was as pure a joy as any I’d experienced since the last time I’d been legally allowed to do anything fun.
Towards the end of high lockdown, things started getting a bit trippy: we found a quiet meadowy corner inch-deep in white cottony fluff, like some weird lunar landscape (according to one of the books these were white poplar catkins). The boys began to insist on a daily skinny dip in a shallow stream at the south end of the park, in full view of everyone walking by. When I recounted this to my wife she promptly ordered them new swimming shorts – her PayPal account was getting some serious use. One day we saw a pheasant. Another, I swear on my life, we met a woman taking her parrot for a walk.
I definitely wasn’t horrified when the schools reopened for year 1s, and park attendance abruptly stopped being compulsory. It would be absurdly sentimental to suggest that full lockdown was some sort of magical experience that I would be keen to repeat. But thanks to the park and a few smart purchases, it was all kind of fun.
Maybe humans are simply capable of adapting to anything; maybe I’m just really lucky with where I live. Either way, and even if we’re still locked down, the imminent school summer holidays – which I used to dread – should be a walk in the park.
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