sandpit

Part I) Big skies, small minds

It was a mad scheme. Completely bloody mad. Let me tell you something. You don’t know nothing about the history of playgrounds, and you don’t know nothing about children. Here’s what it is. Kids don’t need to be told what to do. That’s the first thing, before Dogboy and the Architect and bloody impact attenuating surfacing and all the rest of it get involved. That’s the starting point. Non-directed play. Non-directed. No direction. Do whatever the Dickens you want. Climb a slide backwards. Have a tea party and use the swings as hanging tables. Bloody, I don’t know, lie on the ground.

It was all about giving kids freedom, actually, but you’d never get that from the papers. No. All they want to write about is corruption in local government and the Labour party living in glass houses and you know what it’s a declining industry anyway and I for one don’t give a single, solitary piece of shit. Mind my French. They can all go out of business for all I care. Wouldn’t wipe my arse with the dross they call journalism.

Dogboy? I actually feel for the guy. Let me tell you something. He wasn’t a stooge like they said and he wasn’t in it for money, and how do I know this well because we never paid him any money. Not any more money, that is to say. Not any more money than he would have got for doing the job in the first place, the inspection. Actually, forget him. The starting point is having a coherent worldview. Something that ninety nine percent of the human race fail to achieve. Me, I’ve been a card-carrying member of the Labour party since I was sixteen, since my old man took me to the office on Dorset Road and signed me up, and there’s not a worse day in my life than the day they asked me to leave the party. Look after those who can’t look after themselves, an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work, come together to build everyone up, not just the cream-lickers, that’s my view and it’s always been my view. But away from that? Leave alone. Let folks get on with it. Children especially. It’s criminal what we’ve done to childhood in this country. I should be recognised as a martyr, not thrown out on my ear without so much as a thank you kindly.

You know what they said at the inquiry? That the playground was ‘entirely unfit for use’. On my mother’s life that’s what they said. My actions had ‘directly contributed to a dangerous environment for children’. Fuck off. Dangerous? It was bloody liberating. You have to laugh. It was the press that got stuck in, making up all this rubbish, calling the climbing ramp a deathtrap and all that. Saying we shouldn’t have used velvet.

Let me tell you something. The Architect. There’s someone with a coherent worldview. Sharp as a tack, but slippery. I should have been more careful around him, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. He led me up the garden path a bit but that’s what they all do. I still think of him as a friend. He came to me when I was drinking in the Cleveland and said are you so-and-so who sits on the council and I said yes and he said would I be right in thinking you have final say over the planning of parkland and playgrounds and general sites of developmental interest and I said well yes and he said in that case I have a proposal for you for that land over at Waterhall would you take the time to look at it. And that’s how it started. I recognised straight away he was a dreamer. Only thing is he’s the sort of dreamer where he thinks all the people around him are like people in a dream, that they’re not really there, that they don’t matter. That’s how he was with Dogboy in the end, he threw him under the bus, and me. Not because he was a bad person, because he was living in a dream. He’s abroad now. He got out. I think Cuba or somewhere hot.

The thing people don’t understand is that I was doing it for the children. What do we do with children in this country? We tell them not to climb things, don’t go there, don’t do that, don’t think unless it’s the thing I told you to think. When I was young I had bruises up my legs from dawn to dusk. Never nobody telling me what to do. And now it’s all fences and designed supervision areas and anti-climb paint and you know something? You’re not allowed to build a slide that is longer than six foot coming down. In case the kid goes too fast. Too fast, like that isn’t the bloody idea in the first place. Can you believe it?

Listen to this. My niece, she’s at St Bart’s. They had a sports day and for the sack race they weren’t allowed sacks. They just put their feet together and jumped. Some girlie just ran and won by miles, didn’t even have the dignity to pretend to hop. My niece’s come home in floods of tears. I tell you, I’d had enough. I’d had enough of reading about what they were doing in Denmark and Sweden and looking at pictures of kids in black and white pictures running around happy and all the close-minded, bloody conservative obsession with safety and political correctness and petitions and I just thought, you know what, you’re sixty-two, you’re not getting any younger, you’re the one who chairs the meetings, you’re the one signs the documents, you go and bloody do something about it.

So when the Architect comes and he’s talking abstract shapes and Noguchi and he’s actually educating me on the effects of control on children’s brains and the funnels that we squeeze them through, then, well, it made a lot of sense to me. I have to say, it made a lot of sense to me. Made me realise there’s words for all the things I’d been thinking all along. Concepts. Avant garde, in my temperament. He could tell right off the bat that I was the only one on the council who thought big. Of course the plans looked mental to me,
initially, but then as he said himself it’s because I had been conditioned like everyone else, only thing different being I could admit it and was willing to stand or fall for an ideal.

Let me tell you something. This can never be taken away from me. When we opened it, we got about four hours before someone called and the police come and judged a danger to life and put up the cordon. Four hours. It was this amazing morning, one of those deep blue sea skies that seems bigger than normal, just bright and clear and goes on forever. The kids loved it. They were running around like prisoners set free. Like maniacs. Their parents didn’t know what to make of it, but the kids knew what to do. Now, you can bar me from standing for local government, and issue court orders to pay bloody fines and what you like. But you’ll never take away those hours of happiness that I saw with my own two eyes.

Part II) Life is what you can get away with

It’s not often you hear English in this part of Argentina. Couldn’t help eavesdropping. Imposter syndrome’s one of those that goes around and around. It is an interesting question, though, this, I suppose you might call it, universal provincialism. This sense that other people elsewhere have more exciting, more authentic lives. Where we are now, these beach towns, you think the kids here know they’re living in paradise? That they can surf every day? That the steak is the best in the world? Or do they feel the weight of Catholicism, the condescension of the Porteños, the pathetic weakness of the currency? You tell me. I think they watch YouTube videos of Japan and think that looks fucking cool, I wish I lived there. I think they feel elsewhere like we all do. In my experience, it’s a universal truth, excepting certain regions of California.

The reason I’m telling you this is because I heard you talking about your business idea earlier and I just wanted to interject for a moment and say that Andy Warhol was only half right when he said art is what you can get away with. No. Life is what you can get away with. Your idea sounds nice but it’s too small. Borrow twice as much money. Forget having it in the garden, put it on the roof. Stop underselling yourselves because you think you’re not talented enough or haven’t got the right skills or have never fished before. Think big.

Look, I’m an architect, twenty years in the business, fully chartered, and I would say up front to ignore anything any architect tells you. If they say they can’t build it, fire them and get another one. The tension in the industry used to be between architects and engineers, because architects didn’t know how physics works, only how to draw and spend money. That’s all changed, all gone. Now, architects are best described as gatekeepers of mediocrity. Their only job is to tell you what you can’t do, and supply you with the most limited, most abjectly imagination-less plans humanly possible. Honestly, without meaning to labour the point, my generation of architects have entirely inherited the neuroses of our teachers, all because they tried to change the world, tried to be utopian, tried tower-blocks and new towns and all the Le Corbusier, liberating the working class stuff, and ended up fucking it so badly that now we’ve entirely lost our libido for building. We’ve castrated ourselves because our forefathers were philanderers and died of syphilis.
I digress. You seem like a very perceptive pair. I was sat listening for some time. In fact, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, if I had to characterise you I’d put you in the Umberto Eco camp of, you know, historical wisdom, and you in the Camille Paglia camp of sensual knowledge. It’s a good combination. One of you reflects and one of you feels, and neither of you care what others think. You need that balance and you need that bravery. Well done.

I’ve dealt with a lot of chancers in my time, so I know the real deal when I see it. My last project I was working with the biggest unitary authority in the UK, building the most fantastic, really the most remarkable playground the country, possibly even the continent has ever had. You should have seen it. The councillor on the job? Didn’t know the first thing about it, just wanted his name on the thing. Utterly insincere individual, this nutty old socialist, no drive for the project, no understanding that what we were constructing was joy. That’s what we were making. Joy. That pure thing that children lean towards instinctively and men pay thousands of pounds for the slightest glimpse of.

And the jobsworths you come across. My God. The tappers, I call them. They arrive with a suitcase full of instruments, like a funhouse dentistry set, walk around tapping different things and noting it down. The mouth-breather they sent along for this playground job, well, I rarely say a bad thing if a bad thing needs saying, I’m very phlegmatic in that respect, but this fool truly tested my patience. I honestly wondered whether he’d ever been in a playground before or if he was raised inside a television.

But that, to bring this discussion back to the matter at hand, is the genius of building in a place like this. In England, people follow regulations to the letter because they automatically assume someone somewhere is smarter than them and knows best. Here, they understand instinctively that it’s morons all the way down. And I think you understand this too. You understand that the fabric of human society is defined not by its robustness but by its frangibility, by the fact that applying pressure in any given direction reveals not an elasticity but merely a prior, false, appearance of strength. It’s our job, gentlemen, scholars, the dreamers of this world, to apply pressure and see what gives.

Now here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to look over your plans, and I’m going to do this for free. Then I’m going to break your hearts and put them back together again, and make you forget you even considered not using bamboo. You will pay for lunch. Then, together, we’re going to construct the most exceptional, most genuinely inspirational taqueria this place has ever seen.

Part III) The past doesn’t hit you ’til the afternoon

I guess I didn’t expect it to be so clean. And the doors don’t lock, obviously. But they don’t take away your shoelaces or anything. One guy had whatdayacallit, spice. There was a garden and he’d go and smoke it at the top. I didn’t get involved in that. I just watched the telly really. There was a guy who never took his sunglasses off. He tried to teach me chess but that kind of thing isn’t my bag to be honest. I was more after football chat or something to take my mind off it.

The mornings were fine. That’s when you’d come, eat the brekky, take the meds, then there’d be time for working in the garden or watching Jeremy Kyle and having a cup of tea. They tried to stop us watching Jeremy Kyle but we all sort of got together and said we liked it so in the end I reckon they figured it weren’t worth the bother and stuck it on.

I think it weren’t fair the way I was treated. I made an honest mistake but the way I was told things I had been under a mistaken impression. See, you’ve really got to go back to Kirsty and the baby to understand this. Cause when we lost the baby the light just switched off inside her, you know? I didn’t understand it at the time. I weren’t patient like I should have been. I understand it now.

Getting the job with Micky’s firm, going along with him and whatnot, at the time it was nice. Being outside, chatting to the people, couple of tinnies at the end of the day. Nice. But I’m talking about the big job, the one that started everything going Pete Tong. Because, see, at that time me and Kirsty weren’t broken up but we wasn’t together either, I was on the settee and she just stayed in her room. So with the big job, when that wanker from the council comes and he’s got the Architect and they’re just chatting children, children, children, and happiness and making history, and Micky being on his holidays, I couldn’t say no. My stupid plan was to take Kirsty there when it were done and say I was working on this job and make her proud and then say that we should try again because people have lost babies before and it isn’t the end of the world like it was for her. That worked out didn’t it?

So I signed all the stuff. Like a mug. My name was on them certificates. I didn’t go round and do my checks and measurements and all that that I normally do, but as I say the prick from the council told me he had taken care of everything and I was doing a good job and it’s all kosher. He said he would protect me and make sure my name didn’t come up if there was any trouble. Did he fuck.

As I said I think it weren’t fair the way I was treated. So he got kicked off the council. So what. He was old anyway, no big loss is it? And the Architect was gone by the time it came to court, he'd scarpered somewhere. It’s me that had to suffer, losing my licence, back on the dole, Kirsty walking out, all that. My troubles coming back.

Something I never told anyone. I called it in. The morning they opened it I went down and looked and I felt sick to my stomach because I knew it weren’t right. The slide went straight down. The monkey bars, if you can call them that, sort of spun round and, well, rotated into each other. It’s hard to describe without a diagram or something. Never seen nothing like it. The sandpit was full of dice. Like dice dice. Like one two three four five six dice. First thing a kid’s gunna do, pick one up and eat it. Chocking hazard. I knew it weren’t on so I called the police and said they had to come close it down. Took a while to convince them I was serious. Then I went home and sat on my settee.

It’s funny. Like I said, the mornings weren’t so bad, cause you were doing stuff. Your mind was set on something, yeah? The afternoons were the worst. That’s when I’d get to thinking about Kirsty, about mum and dad, about Micky and the boys. About the baby. Just sit there thinking about the ways things used to be and what a piece of work I was and how they probably should have taken my shoelaces away cause I was in a mood to do something stupid.