Vignettes from Hyde Park
With a gorgeous sunny afternoon promising outside my window, I set out for a long walk, destination Hyde Park. I remember being here during the snowy-cold winter when I was nine; a older man held seeds in his hand until it was covered with a teeming mass of song birds. That was more than 20 years ago; the man wasn't young then, and two decades later I suspect he no longer feeds the song birds from his outstretched palm.
I was mulling over this snapshot of a memory as I strolled through the park. At the western side of this open space, I slipped into a side garden, where a well-manicured square pond was gated off but with slots in the surrounding hedges to see into this miniature sanctuary where waterfowl swam unbothered. I sat down on a bench to take a break, and heard a voice nearby. I thought he was talking to me, but I quickly realized that the elderly man on the next bench down the way was chatting with the squirrels, asking them if they preferred peanuts or chestnuts. They apparently preferred both, in large quantity, and were happy to take it all right out of his hands. I suppose there are some things that have been going on for centuries and will go on until the end of civilization, and feeding the tame animals in Hyde Park is one of those things.
I continued on around the outer edge, passing by the children's park at the north end that has, among other things, a replica of a shipwreck crawling with dozens of thrilled children. Skirting the outside the kids' enclosure, I almost ran over a little boy, younger than school age, who was careening around in tears until he found a sympathetic-looking adult. To this random woman, he shouted through sobs, "I'm lost! I'm lost!" The woman, watching kids of her own, asked the little boy where his mummy and daddy were. He choked out the answer, "I don't have a mummy and daddy!" The woman looked about as mystified as me, but managed to get the kid to explain that he was there with another little friend's family. It didn't seem like there was much for me to do, and by the time I turned the corner two bobbies had been informed of the problem and were headed that way. I don't know what happened to the mummy- and daddy-less little boy, but he looked to be in good hands, so I moved along.
Past the lake where paddle boaters were out en force on the unseasonably warm afternoon, alongside the Princess Diana memorial fountain, over the grassy spaces where families nap in the rare sun. I exited the park as I had entered, through the northeastern edge and an area that goes by the name peculiar name of Speakers Corner. A better name might be soapbox corner, as this is a part of London that apparently has official sanction, or maybe just historical precedent, to be a gathering place for everyone who has something to yell from the rooftops, or at least from the top of a short step-ladder. All manner of outspoken folks show up, as do crowds who come more to heckle than to hear the spoken word. An African nationalist in a communist-era Russian fur cap and several dozen strings of Mardi Gras beads shouted about white men's diseases, at which one heckler shouted, "Alright, what about Asian bird flu?!" Another man was making no sense at all, but was wearing a baseball cap with what I can only describe as devil horns and a big white banana sticking out of the top; this was accessorized by a forty of liquor in his right hand. A woman in a wedding dress was handing out cookies, and though there was no evidence of her associations, it seemed to me like something the Scientologists might do. In one very quiet corner was perhaps the most inexplicable, a sign that said "Christian Atheists" and an apparently more reticent man wearing a sandwich board that said, "Reject god to follow jesus." Hmm...ok.
In a different corner was a more vocally religious crowd. I have to admit that despite all my politically correct intentions to the contrary, watching young dark-skinned men in semi-traditional garb shouting fundamentalist screeds with a Koran in one hand and the other hand in a clenched fist kind of makes the skin on the back of my neck crawl. Heh, almost as much as it does when I listen to white-skinned fundamentalist Christians shouting their screeds on street corners. It's all relative, ya know.
And that was my few short hours in Hyde Park.
I was mulling over this snapshot of a memory as I strolled through the park. At the western side of this open space, I slipped into a side garden, where a well-manicured square pond was gated off but with slots in the surrounding hedges to see into this miniature sanctuary where waterfowl swam unbothered. I sat down on a bench to take a break, and heard a voice nearby. I thought he was talking to me, but I quickly realized that the elderly man on the next bench down the way was chatting with the squirrels, asking them if they preferred peanuts or chestnuts. They apparently preferred both, in large quantity, and were happy to take it all right out of his hands. I suppose there are some things that have been going on for centuries and will go on until the end of civilization, and feeding the tame animals in Hyde Park is one of those things.
I continued on around the outer edge, passing by the children's park at the north end that has, among other things, a replica of a shipwreck crawling with dozens of thrilled children. Skirting the outside the kids' enclosure, I almost ran over a little boy, younger than school age, who was careening around in tears until he found a sympathetic-looking adult. To this random woman, he shouted through sobs, "I'm lost! I'm lost!" The woman, watching kids of her own, asked the little boy where his mummy and daddy were. He choked out the answer, "I don't have a mummy and daddy!" The woman looked about as mystified as me, but managed to get the kid to explain that he was there with another little friend's family. It didn't seem like there was much for me to do, and by the time I turned the corner two bobbies had been informed of the problem and were headed that way. I don't know what happened to the mummy- and daddy-less little boy, but he looked to be in good hands, so I moved along.
Past the lake where paddle boaters were out en force on the unseasonably warm afternoon, alongside the Princess Diana memorial fountain, over the grassy spaces where families nap in the rare sun. I exited the park as I had entered, through the northeastern edge and an area that goes by the name peculiar name of Speakers Corner. A better name might be soapbox corner, as this is a part of London that apparently has official sanction, or maybe just historical precedent, to be a gathering place for everyone who has something to yell from the rooftops, or at least from the top of a short step-ladder. All manner of outspoken folks show up, as do crowds who come more to heckle than to hear the spoken word. An African nationalist in a communist-era Russian fur cap and several dozen strings of Mardi Gras beads shouted about white men's diseases, at which one heckler shouted, "Alright, what about Asian bird flu?!" Another man was making no sense at all, but was wearing a baseball cap with what I can only describe as devil horns and a big white banana sticking out of the top; this was accessorized by a forty of liquor in his right hand. A woman in a wedding dress was handing out cookies, and though there was no evidence of her associations, it seemed to me like something the Scientologists might do. In one very quiet corner was perhaps the most inexplicable, a sign that said "Christian Atheists" and an apparently more reticent man wearing a sandwich board that said, "Reject god to follow jesus." Hmm...ok.
In a different corner was a more vocally religious crowd. I have to admit that despite all my politically correct intentions to the contrary, watching young dark-skinned men in semi-traditional garb shouting fundamentalist screeds with a Koran in one hand and the other hand in a clenched fist kind of makes the skin on the back of my neck crawl. Heh, almost as much as it does when I listen to white-skinned fundamentalist Christians shouting their screeds on street corners. It's all relative, ya know.
And that was my few short hours in Hyde Park.
posted by skylanda at 9:11 PM
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