Park Life

The park is not just a place to empty the dog out and get mugged for your phone, or to race pushchairs and crash odd-shaped bikes. All human life is here.

Kids stand contentedly smearing 99 flakes round their cake holes in the diesel fumes of the ice cream van, weekend dads stare abstractly at one-legged pigeons scattering psittacosis while they fight over a chip. And the ancients run their fingers over the names of old comrades on the backs of the benches.

Still drunk Sunday leaguers shout, ‘Square,’ and ‘man on,’ and ‘for f**** sake.’ Red-faced joggers limber up, while dreaming of the full face at home, then out for some beers with their mates. Lovely jubbly. Poseurs pump iron on the new contraptions and a swarthy tennis player with a demon serve has a racquet in one hand and a fag in the other. A watery sun smiles down on us all.

Sounds: By day dogs bark, kids yell and all manner of music drifts over the hedges, calypso and gangsta, fox trot, dubstep and grime. By night the screams of the foxes mingle with the squeals of lovers and sometimes the hovering chopper means man-on-the-run. A hound down the street thinks the sirens are the bay of his pack and he joyfully calls back in a dog and car chorus, then they pass and he stops, hangs his big dog head and wonders why they ran off without him.

Sadly gone are the galloping police horses and the doppler whoosh of the Eurostar, engines fore and aft. One night there was a monumental fireworks display; a barrage of aerial bombshells threatened to take out the windows as if NATO was playing games down the garden. Sometimes the delicate chimes of Christ’s Chapel waft this way when the wind allows. Then there is the ever present swish of the South Circular which you can trick your mind into thinking is sea.

Also gone are the bagpipes. About ten years back on odd mornings, a faint skirl arrived with the breeze, a ghostly piper playing at dawn. People scoffed when I told them that but I swear it’s true.

However, the strangest thing I ever heard in the park was also the strangest thing I ever saw. First came the commotion of some moving machine through the trees closely followed by the padding of light feet… paws? Then shouts, a man shouting. But what is he shouting? ‘Mush’? Is he shouting ‘Mush’? A team of loll-tongued huskies raced toward me dragging a sled on wheels, Ben Hur on the back of it, wild haired and sweating, clinging on and shouting. It seemed exigent to fling myself in a bush and as I lay the sled swept by its charioteer yelling, ‘Morning,’ and, ‘dreadfully sorry.’ Perhaps I imagined the crack of a whip.

I’d like to have asked him if he was flying the Dulwich huskies to Alaska for the Iditarod but there was little opportunity for chatting. Maybe he did and maybe he won because he never came back. Surely the dogs preferred the white wastes to the Dulwich green and he swapped his commute for a cabin.

Dog teams, pipers and sex in the bushes, failed footballers, fireworks and fights; roller blade hockey, Earl Grey at ten thirty, sausage rolls, burgers and cakes… oh, and ducks. What more could you ask?

Dulwich Park is just a field behind the houses but it’s also all things to all people, a field of dreams.

© Steve Overbury 2011

Steve’s book London Babylon: The Beatles and the Stones in the Swinging Sixties is available in local bookshops or from www.londonbabylon.co.uk priced £12.99. There are 414 pages of previously untold stories, anecdotes and pictures. Each visitor to the site is entitled to the two ‘missing’ chapters free.

See Steve’s blogs: London-babylon.blogspot.com, Spoot-shoot.blogspot.com, beastdulwich.blogspot.com/

Bugaboo racing

Most days, sporty young mums can be seen arriving at the park with their children in pushchairs and jogging around the perimeter, pushing baby in front. At first it looked like light exercise and a good idea, but more recently they have been gathering in packs, the speed has picked up and it has begun to resemble a battle of the gladiators.

Mother and Bugaboo hurtle through the park gates and onto the circuit, mother panting and pushing, baby clinging to arm rests, little fingers white with exertion, body hanging over, neck bent at 45 degree angle by G-force, mouth pulled back in rictus grin, wind blasting into chops, lips parted and vibrating, dead midges on milk teeth, eyes streaming.

‘Why no windscreen like dadda car?’

She digs in the Osmozz trainers and takes one hand from the Bugaboo to adjust her sports bra. He chokes back a scream as the pushchair keels over to the right and he grips even harder as she struggles to restore its balance, then she kicks hard and he feels the acceleration; this one is going to be a wild ride. He wants to poo. Perhaps he already has pooed. His blanket blows up into his face and his exposed legs are freezing. Suddenly the blanket drops and his view of the morning world is revealed; it’s Grand Theft Auto without the auto.

He is the auto.

“Fingers cold. Can’t hold on, head too heavy. Want it to stop. Mumma could leave me with Geena the dog. Sleep in basket with doggie. Why don’t she give me goggles? Or bandana? I need helmet. She drink too much wine and had fags so do more than ten laps today. She fart like motorboat too. Putt putt putt.”

This is just a rehearsal for the main event, the Bugaboo Grand Prix. Up to fifteen sleek chariots each with a white-faced powerless little jockey strapped firmly in to its cockpit, the lycra-clad participants all chatting, their insouciance hiding a grim resolve; they all know why they’re here. This is the Dulwich Park Death Race and only one über mummy will survive.

It starts amicably enough, or it seems amicable. Then they pick up the pace and begin jostling for position, indiscernibly at first, then ostentatious shouldering – bugaboo as battering ram. Every now and then one of them will move through the pack apparently to chat with someone fresh but what’s really going on is the surreptitious push for the front, the fever for the finishing line disguised as the need to talk to Julia about how short is the life of the long life light bulb “like the summer of a dormouse my dear”. Push, shove, a bugaboo is clattered out of the gossiping pack and careers off into the rhododendrons, its driver wrestling with the grips desperately dragging it back towards the course in a scene straight from Ben Hur.

“Sorry darling,” lies a mad eyed mumma, “Didn’t see you?” Course she saw her, she just tried to maim her. The great Dulwich Park stroller disaster. They’ll be pulling bits of mangled pushchair out of that bush for weeks. Too bad about the kid; wrong place wrong time. A tiny little chalk outline and the remains of a lolly melted into the grass.

Then the final sprint to the line. It’s up on two wheels now. She loses control, bugaboo snaking, she gets tank slap like Valentino Rossi moments before he goes over the handlebars. The terrified child swings in the chair from one side to the other - a drunk midget in a slalom, snot flying and screaming, his lolling head threatening to leave its shoulders: Maaammmaaaa!

The finish line approaches and with mere millimetres in it she gives a flying shove and the buga is over, the child’s legs splayed in front of it to buffer the impact as he hurtles panic-stricken towards a dozing, cider-drinking man on a bench. Mum shows no sign of triumph as she deftly whisks the buggy out of the derelict’s way and jogs gently towards the Porsche Cayenne, job done, other mummies mashed.

Later the combatants will re-convene at the cake shop (which conveniently keeps a decent cellar) and over a couple of 14-ounce glasses of Pinot (“I shouldn’t really darling. Oh go on then”) they will mull over fitness and the next day’s event. In the buggy park, the little jockeys stare at each other mute with fright, brains scarred and nappies full, sadly still too small to figure an escape route and make a break for it.

The Dulwich Park Vortex Theory

I’ve noticed an extraordinary thing: the joggers in the park seem mainly to go round in an anti clockwise direction. Strangely, this is in accordance with the bathtub vortex theory which states that water going down a plug hole in the northern hemisphere will swirl in an anti clockwise direction while that in the southern hemisphere will proceed in a clockwise direction.

Dog walkers seem to exhibit similar behaviour i.e. when they enter the park gates they are more often than not inclined to turn to the right rather than the left. However dog walkers are less reliable observationally than joggers because they have to periodically pick up poo, search for their dog in the bushes or stop and have a chat with other dog walkers. They talk while staring and smiling at each other’s dog while the dogs mill around sniffing each other’s bums, and when they set off again you can’t remember who was going in what direction or which dog is which and you have to abandon the whole experiment.

Curiously, the users of the recumbent bicycles seem to counter the theory. I might have made a miscalculation but it seems that the majority of fans of the low-slung velocipede proceed in a clockwise direction. But here’s the weird part, the wheels of their vehicles are spinning anticlockwise in accordance with the bathtub vortex theory. However, a lot of recumbent users don’t take things sufficiently seriously perhaps because they are six; they mess about, crash into buggies, stop for ice creams and generally forget which way they were going, so they are also unreliable in experimental terms.

This does though raise a fascinating question: Do joggers in Sydney and Adelaide all run round their parks in a clockwise direction? Is the earth’s spinning such a pull on us that we have been blindly complying with larger forces all this time? Do we have any choice? Are we just hamsters in a wheel doomed to scuttle either one way or the other depending on whether we are up north or down south?

I ran all these theories past my wife the other night and suggested that in the interests of research we should invest in some high powered binoculars and a paintball gun for marking the dogs and their walkers, but she said, maybe I was spending too much time staring out of the window and not enough time working, and did I want her to ‘phone the Maudsley? When I tried to explain it all again I just started going round in circles.