Batboy and Sub Par Plasters

Monday was a bit of an odd one. It was mine and Jason’s wedding anniversary. Sixteen years since we were married (nineteen years together) and we were apart. Normally I’m not too bothered about things like that. It’s just a day, and life dictates that you are not always going to be either together or in the right space for celebrating even if you are together. This time though, I was a bit forlorn (like the cow with the crumpled horn).

A large part of being out of sorts is down to the fact that since we moved here, both Oscar and Jason have been spending large parts of every week back up in Leicester for various reasons. I’m pretty sanguine about it most of the time. Some of the time I even actively love being on my own, but there are times when the novelty does wear off a bit and this was one of them. They left last Thursday morning before I got up and they will be back some time on Thursday evening. Too long.

I am excellent at entertaining myself. I have a million and one interests that neither of my menfolk share. It is fair to say that Jason and I have almost diametrically opposed taste in almost everything except each other and chips. I am also surprisingly competent at life, when pushed. There are plenty of things I wouldn’t actively volunteer for, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do them all. I never feel like I am missing a part of me when Jason is gone, but he is my best friend and I like hanging out with him, so I just straight up miss him. Even though he persists in leaving his dirty socks in strange places. That right there is evidence of deep and abiding love. I did not drown him in the marina when I found his socks in the bookcase, your honour.

I was also in rough shape with my mental health on Monday, which didn’t help matters much. Monday was pretty much a series of panic attacks, large and small, interspersed with activities to stop the panic attacks and do something more interesting instead.

I was confined to the boat in the morning, switching tasks and failing to get any meaningful work done with a head full of snakes. In the afternoon I went for a walk, for a change of scene.

It was another blazingly hot day and I decided to wear my sandals. Big mistake - huge mistake - as Richard Gere would say if he sent Julia Roberts to Mile End park in uncomfortable Clarks’ shoes and someone refused to sell her Compeed. Luckily for me, nobody refused me plasters and by the time I got to the Co-op in Mile End I spent £6 on a combination of excellent blister plasters and really shit, Co-op own brand plasters, which failed to stick to my skin, which seems like a big design flaw.

When I had glued my feet back together I was able to appreciate the beauty of Mile End park anew. It’s a long, ribbon like affair with planted up bridges that cross the canals and exhibition spaces hidden in mounds of earth like if the Teletubbies went all Eastenders. There were lots of people enjoying the heat, ripping all their clothes off and basting in the afternoon sun. I was not one of them. I admire clothes rippers, but I am not a natural nudist. I am very much a keep your vest on unless there is a dire emergency and if there is a dire emergency, put on another vest.

My goal was to walk through Mile End park from one end to the other and then immediately hurl myself into another park which I had spied on the bus going to Clapton Pond and earmarked as worthy of investigation, which I duly did.

Victoria Park, it turns out, is the oldest municipal park in Britain. It was opened in 1845 for the enjoyment of the people of the East End, and they have been duly enjoying it ever since. Apparently it covers 86 hectares. I had sore feet and had already trekked through one massive park, so I only did a couple of hectares at best, but they were very nice ones.

It’s one of those London parks, like Regent’s Park that has a ruddy, great road cutting through the middle of it. I speculate this is to bump off some of the more annoying and inattentive children who frequent it, thus making it a calmer environment for other park users.

To begin with, I walked through it and onto Lauriston Road, which has a bunch of super cute shops and cafes, because I was hot and tired and needed a drink before any more serious park stuff could happen. I bought a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock because I was feeling retro, and took refuge in an Oxfam shop. While I was in there I had a terrifically horrible panic attack for some minutes and thought I might actually pass out. I took refuge by the Moomin’s spinner until I stopped sweating and seeing stars. Then I was good to go, except I couldn’t go, which nearly brought on another panic attack.

I couldn’t go because a man in a wheelchair who was naked except for a pair of swimming trunks was trying to get himself into the shop. It was not going well because the door had a lip and the lip was also broken and he couldn’t get purchase but also wouldn’t accept help from anyone inside the shop. At one point all of us were sweating profusely and he leaned forwards and I thought he might slide out onto the floor. I was just worrying about which parts of an almost naked man drenched in sweat it was polite to grab if he did tip out when he righted himself and managed to shuffle himself into the shop. I felt like giving him a round of applause. Or at least a score.

I headed out to the most Victorian bit of the park I could find, which was a very splendid boating lake with a fountain, where people were slowly rowing round in circles and other people were eating rapidly liquifying ice creams and watching them exert themselves from the safety of a bench. There were pedalos too, but nobody was peddling, which was a shame. If I had been with someone else, I’d have definitely had a go on a pedalo, but they’re no fun on your own. They just look sad, and I was already sad, so I took the bench and made plans to come back with jolly people.

One thing I have noticed from going about London is people’s propensity to cycle about with speakers that broadcast their music for all to hear. A few weeks back I had the misfortune to be at a zebra crossing next to a man on a BMX who had half a sound system gaffer taped to his bike. He was playing Bob Marley so loud it made my bones shake, so God alone knows what it was doing to him. If he did more than a mile like that I swear he’d get stress fractures.

When I say that people do this by the way, I have noticed that it is men who do this. I have started to pay attention to the musical cyclists because I didn’t want to be accused of bias, but it is always men who think you want to hear Shaggy screaming ‘It Wasn’t Me’ as they whiz past in their mamilotards. There was a lot of this going on in the park on Monday afternoon. A lot.

The only time this type of musical accompaniment pleased me was when a small, solemn child scooted past me in tandem with his dad, also solemnly scooting. As they processed, the theme tune from Seventies t.v. Batman assailed my ears and made me properly grin. It worked all the better because you could see from their faces that this was important, scooting work they were doing. They were on a mission. Probably to go and rescue a man who had fallen out of his wheelchair in Oxfam. Batboy would know exactly what to do in that situation. Thank God.