Parkenders

Life happens not in smooth, linear trajectories, but in episodes - small, insignificant, broken, irrelevant fragments. Not least so in Greenwich Park. On an isolated visit, the park provides those light vignettes that amuse and bubble up during a subsequent dinner party - just before the misguided Trinity Cream - to provide distraction from the just-too-burnt caramel and the frankly chewy custard. Oh yes, the Baileys and Baxters and Buckleys and Barneys all dish up that one-off story - that cocking of the unscrupulous dog's leg on the bald man's head on a sunny day of reverie and reading... BUT the real park, the REAL PARK, requires frequent visits, regular attention, bleak determination to enable the scratching of the surface of what's really going on.

Lecturers at university used to use words like 'microcosm' and 'juxtaposition' and possibly 'paradoxically cognate' to describe a scenario like this. How bourgeois the bubbles are, up they go, up and over, glinting in the early morning light above the Observatory - but let's be honest, folks, we all know what this is about.

Oh yes, Greenwich Park is a microcosm of repressed sexual desire, juxtapositions of class war and paradoxically cognate lost lives. Greenwich Park is the fertile and moist ground for all sorts of things. I know. I've been there.

Those fragmented, irrelevant breakages are starting to come together. The Major doesn't believe in fragments, of course. That would be too much like giving in to those unsavoury elements that he would, were he still in the army, be combating on all fronts. 

But I know better. From the tales he tells and my own observations, I know that the park contains that rare thing - something that is not uploadable to YouTube - dense, usable narrative.

And I intend to mine it.

Canary in a Coalmine

I did a mean thing today.

I played the Canary in a Coalmine game.

And I got Ella to play along (Ella can be very suggestible after a bottle of Sancerre at Chapter Two in Blackheath).

I walked in and said: God, I get so dizzy even walking in a straight line.

I had hoped I’d get: You say you want to spend the winter in Firenza? in just the right speak-song lilt, but the butcher looked at me with narrowing eyes and all I got was a ‘Next please!’, but I didn’t risk a jolly first-to-fall-over-when-the-atmosphere-is-less-than-perfect so I pussied out and proceeded to order the Major’s usual of rump steak twice, twice mind you, through the mincer. Oh god, it can’t be once or thrice, no twice, always twice, so I said to the back of – admittedly – the butcher’s assistant or apprentice (am I a butcher’s coward?): My sensibilities are shaken by the slightest defect. He didn’t react. I took the mince and half a dozen eggs and we fled.

But by the strict rules of the Canary in a Coalmine game, you are not out of play until you have uttered every line (repeats disregarded) in a public and inappropriate place. 

Is the chemist an inappropriate place to say: I’m so afraid to catch a dose of influenza? Ella thought so. But the leaden eyelids of the assistant at Till no. 2 did not rise to the bait. Now if I tell you that I suffer from delusion...? The assistant looked up at Ella, non-plussed, attention held for a nanosecond, a fleeting light in a tunnel snuffed out by a gust of stale air, but gave her a receipt and change in one lump in that inconsiderate and soul-destroying way of the teenage shop assistant...

Ella giggled incessantly as we headed down the hill.

I don’t think the Major suspects my double life.

I love the smell of Greenwich in the morning

It was only after another sabulous trip to the UAE that I thought: Great camels! I’ve left the blog iron on!

It all started so full of hope and the smell of honeysuckle and orange blossom, and I gripe to the Major about lack of time and too much mean bitching going on in the reading group and the sheer horror of having put my bank card back the wrong way up in my purse and having to look after a new Labrador just as a Greenwich blog would come into its very controversial own.

Yes, a two-pronged approach here – as I return for what I hope is third time lucky. The Labrador came about one morning as the Major woke with a start, wild-eyed and with a thin line of perspiration behind his left ear, and declared that a man could not be whole without a dog, that we needed a dog, that a dog was just what I needed in order not to be lonely at home every day (?!). He roamed the Internet for a while and then acknowledged defeat – until suddenly he zoomed off to Braintree to put down a deposit for a Prince among Pups. Yes, our Labrador is descended from Norwegian kings (or champions) and is adorable. Gone are the weeks of wiping dog diarrhoea off the kitchen walls, not getting any sleep and familiarising ourselves with the previously unconquered territory of the pet shop – a strangely dusty ‘affaire’ full of forward, yet nervy people perusing the diamante collar section and tag vending machine. We are now fully au fait with the routine and the Major gets up at six to prepare for a gentle jog’n’dog around Greenwich Park.

The other prong to my fork is 2012. A saggy synthesis of dog thesis and Olympics antithesis arises here. 2012, a dastardly organisation with sinister motives headed by Seb, the Evil Prince of Parkness, who plans to run the thundering thousand Horsemen of the Apocalympics through the Flower Garden in our Park (yes, OUR park, THE park, favourite of Henry VIII, birthplace of Elizabeth and Mary, the site of Roman ruins, Saxon burial grounds, honest sausages) just for the twee backdrop of the glittering Thames and the bling of beleaguered banking below. Little enthusiastic TwentyTwelvers dash up to you with leaflets and assurances that they are ‘neutral’ and that you can have your say when everyone knows that the whole sinister deal is long done and will mean months of closure and building work and the tiresome murder and muggings of mutts and owners in the borough parks that no one would otherwise frequent.

Well, on behalf of the dogs and bitches of Greenwich, thank you.