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.