I was thinking about death and its relative nearness as I noticed an inscribed stone that marked last year’s centenary of the park.
I looked across the valley and from a distance not much would appear to have changed since its opening in 1925. Less factory buildings, more houses, more roads, more overhead cables, but nothing too obvious.
The employment of a bit of modern editing technology would see it fit for purpose for a decent space-filling panoramic shot in a period drama set in a Yorkshire mill village.
In the park itself the trees must be more abundant and taller, I would doubt the tennis courts were there when it opened and the outdoor gym and skateboarding area certainly weren’t. They probably didn’t have to close the grounds at dusk 100 years ago as the shopping infrastructure and, perhaps, etiquette meant the use of a communal facility for alfresco evening drinking didn’t have to be discouraged.
The degree of rust on the goalposts on the sloping junior football pitch told me they were more than likely the same ones we defended or attacked as children.
I briefly wonder if the park will make it to 150. If so, what will today’s children of less than ten witness as they stare out and consider the changes that have or haven’t taken place since they propelled footballs towards or away from rusting goalposts?
There’s a slight sense of overall deterioration – the shelters especially - but then again, I have been alive for more than half of the park’s existence and wouldn’t like to compare my now own reduced state.
I don’t think I’ve done too bad, but could have done better. I would appear to have kept fairly fit and, like the valley when observed from a distance don’t seem to have changed too much, though mentally and internally maybe that’s not the case.
The self-destruct button has never been too far from hand and I’ve undoubtedly been on the edge of pressing it on a few occasions.
My novel’s main character Michael Morrison wrote his own book called Walks Through Weeping Cities, and I thought about stealing his title for my musings, only using the word ‘villages’. But these villages don’t weep. Not really. It’s me that weeps as I walk among them.
Today as I look out across the River Aire and the hills that surround it I feel a real sense of loss, of disappearance. A gradual fading to nothing of a life I thought would always be there but that I didn’t know I wanted. A shift towards death, of me, of something.
All in, it hasn’t changed much, but maybe I have. Maybe I want it to or maybe I actually wish it was exactly as it used to be half of the park’s life ago and those who live here were the same.
It’s not though, and they’re not. They can’t be. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that.