A walk in the park

I run through the park. Every day. Not in my exercise gear, IPod surgically attached to my arm. No. I run through the park from the station to the office, bags flying. I run through the park from the office to meetings. At the end of the day, I run through the park from my office back to the station. It isn't a sprint or a jog. It's more like something between a trot and a gallop, fuelled entirely by stress. And I do it pretty much without thinking about it. Stepping into the park I am immediately reminded by an automatic guilt switch in my brain that I am not there to enjoy the foliage, I am in the park with a destination in mind and I sure as hell had better get there as quickly as possible, so that...the world will not end? So that my colleagues will not miss a second longer of my awesome brain power than they absolutely have to? So that I will not miss the last ever Northern line train before the world comes to an end? Stupid, isn't it. But it took me quite a long time to work out how contradictory this was. I love telling people that my morning commute takes in a beautiful park, but frankly if you're running so fast you don't notice the trees what is the point. You might as well hit the apocalypse of Victoria station and be done with it. So, after a therapeutic coffee with a mate at work I decided to do something I had not done in 15 years of galloping through this park. I would go out at lunchtime and walk around it, without any bags or phones on me, taking in every sight as I walked. I would go slowly, and tune out any inner thoughts so I could hear the noises around me properly. So off I went. As I stepped into the park, my brain message began to beat the familiar drum. Hurry up! Get those tourists out of your way, they are stopping your ascent up the career ladder! I ignored them resolutely, and to throw my ant march like routine entirely, I picked a different route. I walked slowly by the quite beautiful flowers that the park gardeners had obviously been at some pains to plan out. I stopped and sniffed the lake, and watched moorhens fight swans. Brave lot, those moorhens. Swans, it turns out, take no prisoners. I passed two people snogging passionately among the hydrangeas, and a group of exhausted teenagers moaning about how early they came into London on the Eurostar. And more tourists, Japanese this lot, all with their up to the minute technological gadgets, taking millions and millions of pictures. Including of me. I passed civil servants taking covert sips of tea out of flasks. A couple having a furious row in low undertones so as not to draw attention to their appalling relationship break out, playing itself out among the ferns. I passed Beefeaters walking back from their duty stint at Buckingham Palace. Gardeners digging up summer debris and whingeing about the mess the Olympics infrastructure had left behind. Ducks begging cravenly of ignorant humans hell bent on messing up their digestive systems with stale bread. Squirrels chasing each other from tree to tree, stopping only to snatch bread before the ducks could get to it. Dogs, chasing the squirrels. By the time I got back to my office, I was totally humbled. How was it possible to zone out of all of this world watching? I had walked through the complete panoply of human behaviour and quite a bit of animal experience in the space of 45 minutes. It was a great lesson. A daily park walk is now part of my life. And will no doubt furnish me with endless blogging material as yet more quirks of human interaction unfold in the shadow of the London Eye.