This weekend two things close to my heart celebrated their first birthday – one was Disco 2000, the indie night for aged parents, and the other one was Boby, cheerful daughter of Bob and Not-Bob. It was the second one of those that called us to Hackney and after a few hours playing with Boby’s toys, we took the opportunity to check out the local park. I can’t begin to count the number of times we’ve been to Hackney Downs station but we’ve never been to the place that gives the station its name. A project that’s brewing in my head requires me to rectify this.
And it’s an interesting park. A big sandpit, a wooden fort and a mosaic of zoo animals. Eva liked the animals too and performed a little dance on the “stage” in front of them. It was made by local people, including the very East London-sounding “Tess of Spitalfields”:
I wonder what you need to do to be able to affix a place name to your name these days. It used to be all the rage. Now, I’m just stuck with a surname that suggests a far greater skill in hatmaking than I possess. Well, whoever Tess is, I like her. And she has mad mosaic making skills too. Here’s Reuben admiring them:
So, what else was there to do? Well, the fort was fun although there was a bit of toddler congestion on the rope bridge. Eva very slowly and cautiously walked over it with me, a queue of similarly cautious children building up behind her. Then she got scared at the top of the slide and turned around back over the bridge. It was a bit painful. Roo, meanwhile, had found a short cut to the slide:
And Eva found some slides that were so tiny that not even she could be scared:
There was also what appeared to be a monolith in the sandpit, reminiscent of the scene at the start of “2001”. My children provided the ape-like behaviour to go with it:
Reuben also enjoyed some big-boy swinging on the net swing. You can tell by the angle of this that Daddy was in charge:
While Eva had a meltdown because she wanted to go on the baby swings. Then when another toddler kindly up a swing for her, it was the wrong one. She’d had some rainbow cake a few hours before and this was the inevitable fallout. It was time to go home. But first, there was just time to pose in the rock garden on the way out:
Oh, they can be cute sometimes. And it’s amazing how she can put a tantrum behind her when there’s a camera about…
