The Country Park
I spoke to a couple the other day who were walking their sons dog (as he was away) and they described the golf course as ‘their country park’. They are right it is like a Country Park.
Since that conversation I kept finding myself thinking : What would you do if you were a child and grew up with something like this as your back garden? I think many children must have had something similar. Would it be like Swallows and Amazons, an idylic childhood with real fires, real bows and arrows and camps and war games. Boats and boat houses, lakes, tool sheds and out-buildings, the list went on and on.
Would you track wild animals and watch their behaviour and find their burrows and nests etc. Would know all the trees and plant varieties……would you turn out to be one of these kids who were never quite able to mix with other kids and prefere to live in a lone fantasy world created around the garden, not quite able to seperate their imagined world from the real world. And is it actually exactly that, that describes a good childhood? I wondered if I would have turned into one of those kinds of loner kids? You know; camping out for 3 nights in a row and hunting for fish and rabbits and that.
I looked back at my children’s childhood and thought what if this had been their garden? Would they be able to negotiate contemporary society and the world they are growing up in. I kind of felt that, if you have a big garden then you might have a small outlook on the world, and if you have a small garden then your world is big! But what…….who knows or could have changed things either way. Not Me.
For the moment I do have my own country park, which is remarkably empty of people and I still feel like its mine.
