A Walk In The Park: Reedswood Park, Bloxwich
JUST when I was arriving at a side exit to this park, a woman was literally being towed out by two such muscular dogs they seemed keen to replace the horses in a remake of Ben Hur.
Yet I was the one who was about to receive some “dog’s abuse”.
Several blue police signs had already told me that my wife should stay safely in the car with our three children.
The words: ‘Police Notice – m/cycles prohibited. Police Reform Act 2002. Vehicles may be seized. Max Penalty £1,000’ sounds to me like shorthand for ‘Mind how you go’.
True to form, ten minutes later I was being harangued from about 200 yards.
The noisy one in a group of half a dozen under-12s shouted across the park: ‘There’s a f****** pervert over there!’
‘Get out, you f****** b****** paedophile!’.
In case I hadn’t heard the first time, he repeated himself twice over. And with an increasingly louder voice.
The woman with the two dogs – which would have eaten this lad for breakfast given half a chance – would have had no such trouble.
Meanwhile, those police signs felt like they were actually reducing my own personal safety by deterring more sensible park users.
This left little old me feeling rather isolated and offended by a pipsqueak who sounded rather less developed than the horse chestnuts swinging in the trees.
Since when has carrying a camera in a park to take pictures of trees been illegal?
Or are we at the point of no return, where children can create no-go areas?
If they ‘know it all’ at such an immature age, chances are they’ll be more prone to lashing out, instead of thinking, when they are older.
I left Reedswood without seeing either the conservation area or fishing pool.
Yet in 1919, Reedswood began housing tents for the Midlands’ first open air school for sickly youngsters.
Incredibly, the school survived for half a century, later becoming the Three Crowns Day Special School.
The park itself was planted in 1886 to replace a derelict coalmine. Today, its overgrown entrances are no longer welcoming. On an August Saturday afternoon when parks should be teeming with gentle families, it felt dark, intimidating and unloved despite evidence that work is under way to try to improve a site which once had its own outdoor swimming pool.
As well as having one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen, it’s also got some good hard court facilities, a large playground and a skateboard ramp.
None of these were being used on what should have been the peak afternoon of the week.
The warning is clear. Take the families out of parks and you might as well just concrete the weed-ridden ‘flower’ beds right over – and let the yobs run riot.
