Playground

This morning i dropped my girl at Summer School and me and my boy went to the playground. It's a horrid little place, broken glass scattered all over, graffiti already scratched in the freshly painted slide. Stupid words proclaiming such-a-body is gay or a slag. Lots of dog poo.

Now we live in quite a nice area, lots of people think it's 'posh' but this bit really isn't. So i'm looking at the trees, the morning blue sky, the aeroplane above us. Thinking about all the families in their matching tracksuits going for their two weeks of sun. I'm looking at the houses opposite with their net curtains and manicured lawns. The lines of bright marigolds and bizzie lizzies. The hanging basket someone forgot to water.

It's making me feel trapped. I want to shout, 'Hello? Excuse me, hello? Does anyone know how i got here?'

It's not that i think i'm above these people, far from it, maybe i wish i was part of it, maybe inside they are as fucked up as the people in the next house. I just feel so out of it, isolated, alone.

I watch my boy. He has his tummy on the swing seat and is turning round and round, twisting the chains on the swing till they nearly touch his head. Then he lifts his feet off the ground and spins wildly until the chains become separate once more, madly jolting him this way and that. He looks up at me and grins, slightly dizzy and crazed from the juddery ride.

I want that. A turn at being crazy. A break from normality. Who wants to just sit on the swing? Sure sometimes that's all you want but not me. Not now. I want to spin till its blurred.
My boy was in this grotty excuse for a playground but he still found a way to rock his little world.

Take me by the hand and lets go there, to where it all blurred and you feel things you've never felt before. Link your arm through mine and we'll run there. Come on!

And when we get back we can just sit on the swings if that's what you still want to do.