The park is a place the I didn’t want to love.

In fact, I began to hate taking my children there when they were just babies.

My kids were both fairly slow to walk. Max was a full 15 months old when he finally saw the point of it.

At the park I had to be hawk-eyed to catch them before they put the cigarette butt into their mouth, or crawled over a bit of broken glass. I had to cajole them to spit out the stones they had been oh so happily sucking away on, and I wondered what the gritty dust of this city tasted like. I hated watching them scrape their sausage fat knees across the harsh plasticized pavement. That stuff pretends to be soft, but it’s just another material to get lodged in the pudding-soft skin of a fast-crawling baby.

Then, as I grew rounder and heavier with Neve on the way, Max was desperate to climb everything, secretly scheming, I imagined, to throw himself off and end his life and with it my own. Melodrama runs in the family, right?!

When I was seven months pregnant, he insisted upon climbing the Helter Skelter. Some other kid’s dad followed him up, thankfully, as there was no way I’d fit up the narrow corkscrew staircase that curled around and around itself, steel rungs reaching about a million feet skyward in the centre of the paved playground. In the end he didn’t throw himself off the top, but zoomed down the spiralling slide with wide open eyes and a pleasure far bigger than his wiggly little body could hold, spilling out of him in screeching joy. And again, and again, he went, my heart in my throat as he climbed the dodgy staircase, using chubby hands and wobbly little toddler legs to push himself skywards.