Park Life

Yesterday tea time we took a proper Sunday walk across south Manchester, all the way to Platt Fields Park and round the boating lake. It was just perfect – leaf mulchy smells and geese looking cross as they bobbed in the blue-green algae. Us buying chocolate on the walk back home. It made me think that we don’t really go walking enough round our way, or use the parks where we are.

On holiday it’s a different story. My favourite places on holiday always end up being the parks we’ve walked in, found an outdoors café in, and sat reading books and papers in. It’s two months exactly since our trip to Paris, the highlight of which for me was, once again, pulling up one of those heavy green metal chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg and reading Murakami and PG Wodehouse. Under all that spangly green light under the plane trees is my favourite place to be reading and watching people and drawing stuff. I love it when you sit so long you start to get drowsy and have to fortify yourself with frothy coffee.

Central Park was a revelation, too, when we went a couple of years ago. I always knew I’d love it, after years of Spiderman comics, Woody Allen films, and umpteen novels set in New York. The whole place occupied a mythical and impossibly romantic space in my mental landscape. The day I first got to venture out into Central Park was my first morning in New York City, and it took the form of a reunion after eighteen years with my first ever boyfriend. It was the first day of spring and it was searingly bright and ludicrously like being in a film. We walked and clambered on huge chunks of granite and wandered down tree-lined lanes and sat beside another boating lake catching up on all that time since we were twenty.

I suppose the park that underlies all my love affairs with parks is Marine Park in South Shields, one of the earliest places I remember visiting. They still have a miniature railway that completes a swift, shunting circuit around the lake and through the woods. It’s the park near the noisy, exciting fun fair. It’s the park that my Big Nanna described as being the place where everyone went dancing during the war. They’d cover the grass with a dance floor and it was set out in different tiers about the bandstand and I think both sets of grandparents talked about going there to dance during the war.

But there was South Park in Darlington, too, which had birds in cages and other animals and a tuck shop. Even Simpasture Park in Newton Aycliffe was brilliant – they had tennis courts and miniature racing cars and a giant metal spider for climbing on.

Anyway, I was glad to find a park in Manchester, one with topiary hedges and fruit trees and honking geese. That’s what I love about this city. Somehow there’s always more stuff to find, more space to spread out in and things to explore. Just so long as I can find somewhere nice to sit with all my books and drawing and writing things, and there’s somewhere nearby to get a proper cup of coffee.