For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking my son to the playground. Or, rather, he’s been taking me, as it’s right beside his school and he’s taken to running straight into it with the pace of a greased pig, leaving me to chuff and bluster after him. Speed, he likes to tell me, is one of his main superpowers. He has several now, with strength and stamina close behind. It’s his speed, however, which comes in most useful here, since he knows that once he’s through its gates, I will be powerless to remove him. There will be other parents present and the social conventions of parenting among strangers mean I will be too mortified to scream after him.
I’d be annoyed if I didn’t find these trips so anthropologically compelling, and if it didn’t also give his baby sister a chance to crawl around. The surface is soft and padded, made not of that slightly spongy playground aggregate I knew growing up, but an altogether more boingy substance covered in thick, wispy fibres somewhere between artificial grass and cow’s fur. Together with the playground’s cheerily undulating topography, it gives the uncanny sense of walking over an unmade bed. It is, in short, one of the few spaces on Earth in which you could not perceive of a baby finding injury, but this is balanced out by the fact it is usually filled with children whose spatial awareness, and moral reluctance to stamping on babies’ heads, could both be termed areas for improvement.
