Above: Heaton Park, last weekend.
Like I said in my last post, I was back in Newcastle at the weekend. Luck had it that I came back for a scorchingly hot few days, and the local park became full of people. On one side of the park, there were families playing, a bowling green, and a coffee vendor. On the other side of the park, pictured above, there was a horde of students. These students clustered in groups of between two to thirty, and I felt far too intimidated to sit anywhere near all these young people being all hip. So I sat near the bowling green and read my book.
On Monday the weather changed, and the council sent some men to tidy up Heaton park. I was amused to see the leftovers:
Heaton Park is actually quite lovely, when you don’t have to kick half a dozen students out of the way to see the views. But I felt a little left out; I didn’t feel part of this world of young, lazing students, each posse blithely burning the shape of a disposable barbecue into the grass.
Heaton is a student area now, and for all that the council might talk about setting right “student ghettos”, they are ignoring the people like me who have lived on the edges of studenthood for a while. I chose to live in Heaton to get away from the reverse snobbery that other areas in the Tyne and Wear urban conurbation have; Sunderland might be a city, but it doesn’t have anything like Heaton. There’s no nice area with a choice of coffee shops in Gateshead’s Low Fell. There’s no late-night shopping strip in Fenham.
But that weekend, unable to get out of the house for fear of triggering my fatigue, I spent a lot of time looking out of the window. In the main, the people who live in Heaton have somewhere to go. Something to do. Last weekend, they might have been headed to the park to see their friends, but Monday meant that they were back at work, or back in the lecture hall. For me, it seemed like another day of an ongoing holiday.
Huck Scarry’s book “The World Around Us” has a brief introduction, where he talks about seeing the world from the window of his flat in Zurich. From my flat, I could see the inhabitants of Heaton pass by, sometimes headed out, sometimes headed home. The best seat in the flat is the one that lets you people-watch all the busy lives outside the window.
This final picture is of the watering of the bowling green. It was late on Sunday evening, in the magic hour, but still hot. The smell of the water jetting out over the grass was just right after such a long, dry day. We stood and watched the water droplets as they were whipped by the strong wind. For a little while, I’d got out past the window.
