Park life

They weren’t familiar park visitors, but a couple with a specific purpose, laden down with camera equipment. They unpacked carefully, without the swift expertise of a professional photographer and his model, working on the clock. Years ago, we went to Japan on our honeymoon, and the girl’s outfit was something I’d seen before in Tokyo – a pink and white frilly knee-length crinoline, flailing with ribbons. In Harajuku, it used to be called Lolita-style, and the girls parade up and down competitively. In this country, I don’t suppose anyone has dressed like that since Bubbles Rothermere died. The only sign of embarrassment was that they would not catch anyone’s eye.

Just as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight. I had made a booking the day before. I arrived. Burak was just finishing the previous customer and gestured with a comb towards an armchair. A Turkish coffee was brought. The customer paid and left and I took his place in the chair before the mirror. ‘Now, sir,’ Burak said, with an ingratiating formality not quite his own. ‘What can I...’ But as he was asking about the haircut, the nervous pale English boy at the next station in the barber’s interrupted. ‘Er, Burak,’ he said, tremulously. ‘I wonder, er, would you mind if I borrowed your...’ ‘Nah,’ Burak said, all ingratiation gone in a fierce flash. ‘Nah. Fuck off.’ He turned to me. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said.

It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so it can only have been half past ten in the morning. A familiar neighbourhood figure zigzagged recklessly across the road towards us. He had something like a sense of purpose about him. Telling a stranger that his avoirdupois could give G.K. Chesterton a run for his money counts as a hate crime ‘Have you got –’ he paused and reckoned – ‘£5? To get something to eat?’ Five pounds seemed an ambitious amount. I thought I’d answer the implied request and not the question he’d actually asked. ‘I’m not going to give you £5,’ I said briskly. He looked about as ghastly as usual – that yellow-grey, oily quality of the long-term heroin aficionado.

Over at the judging for Waggiest Tail, things were getting acrimonious. ‘That bloody woman,’ my new acquaintance muttered. We were sitting behind the rope barrier in the front row and had formed a bond over a serious injustice in Prettiest Bitch. ‘I’m pretty sure she threw this category three, four years back. I happen to know – for a fact – that she made her husband stay overnight in a Travelodge. Dog’s got awful separation anxiety. Husband comes to the park, sitting round the corner. Once the Waggiest Tail starts up, she texts him, and he appears in the dog’s eyeline. Dog starts wagging fit to bust. First prize. Disgrace.’ ‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘You’d be surprised what people are capable of,’ he said.

About halfway round the park, by the last spindly remnants of the Festival of Britain, I bumped into my Scandinavian acquaintance. ‘Beautiful day,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be in Sweden by now.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not quite. My daughter’s going for midsummer – it’s her first time on her own. We’re going a little later but I thought she’d like a treat for having finished her GCSEs.’ ‘How gorgeous!’ I said. Around our feet our dogs greeted each other in a stately way – two schnauzers, hers a beautifully groomed gentleman called Prince with a gravity-defying moustache like a Wilhelmine Feldmarschall; mine a plump and rumpled small person, like the White Queen.

One of us must once have told a political pollster: ‘I really have no idea at all who I’m going to vote for.’ A moment of mild exasperation put us down as ‘Don’t knows’. Forever afterwards, the prospect of an election, whether for Wandsworth council, the Mayor of London or the Battersea parliamentary constituency, brings them out. The doorbell goes, and there is a bright-faced, footsore, ill-dressed but dedicated party activist, clutching a clipboard. Without exception, each is firmly convinced that he knows what you are going to complain about. ‘Why do runners need compulsory declarations that something is “fun”, and amplification, and techno?’ ‘Do you have any concerns about your neighbourhood?’ a Labour canvasser once asked.

There won’t be any cygnets this year. The cob was on the lake this morning on his own, occasionally slapping the water, floating without any evident purpose. His last children were taken away to new homes a year ago. His mate of years, the pen, died last spring. People who live in the country always assume that no one in inner London has much idea of the seasons. But everyone who goes to the park notices some annual events. One used to be the nesting of the pair of swans, and the laying of eggs. The swans look like ballerinas to many people, but to me they always look like London policemen It’s hard not to look at some animals in your own terms, from a different species.