Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 April 2007 14:06:17
Across the road from our house is a lovely little park with pretty plants, ambling paths, a duck pond (or is it a lake?), children's play area, bowling green, crumbling pavilion and a boarded-up toilet block. After almost 5 years of promises, the local council has now started an extensive refurbishment of the park. Being the council they're doing things in a random half-arsed order: first they ripped out the old play area... then they decided to start on re-roofing the bowls pavilion... then part-way through that job they started clearing an area for a new information centre and toilet block. I'm hoping they might start to finish some of the half-done jobs soon... but in the meantime I'm enjoying the suspense of ‘what will they do next?'
Recently they've started to do the new play area. They dug trenches, laid pipes... oh, the suspense, what was it for? They've backfilled with gravel for filter drains to ensure the area doesn't get water-logged. They re-turfed the area. The grass died. They laid down soil on top of the dead grass... oh, the excitement, what type of surface was ultimately planned? They've started to lay down holey rubber matting to ensure a soft landing when the children fall. But, oh, the anticipation, what will the children fall from? They've put up various frames, for swings and roundabouts and climbing... and now they're constructing the slides.
Yesterday I watched three men attempt to put together a flat-pack slide. How hard can that be? Well, it wasn't quite flat. The pieces were yellow plastic curves. And a good few hours was spent with the men standing around trying to figure out how the make the bits fit together to form the spiral slide indicated on the instruction leaflet. It reminded me of the flat-pack committees that seem to congregate around the latest box purchased from Ikea or Argos. Only it wasn't a group of my friends standing in the park pondering how to make part D fit into slot E. It was a group of supposed professionals... and they looked far less confident in the task than any group of my friends would do. I wonder whether the play area will have a safety inspection before it's opened to the public? Or perhaps the council are just relying on the holey rubber matting to do its job efficiently!