Patricia has been very moody lately. She’s not eating much, which worries me, because she has a notoriously voracious appetite and a well-documented penchant for cheese crackers. I want to ask her why, but I don’t want to make her uncomfortable: has Frankie been giving her trouble? I noticed he went off with Carmen the other day and didn’t come back until the morning after. I won’t bring it up.
I am determined to take her mind off the idea of Frankie going off with another bird, so I pull a half loaf of wholemeal Warburtons from my canvas bag. She notices and starts to get closer. “Go on then,” she seems to say. I tear off a large chunk of bread and chuck it at her.
Patricia is a duck, and so are Frankie and Carmen. We became friends a couple of years ago when I first moved near Victoria Park and I noticed her swimming in the boating lake. She seems to like me: I am a crazy duck man after all.
I don’t know if Patricia is her real name, but it’s the one I gave her when I first met her. The way she chewed her bread reminded me of my auntie Pat. We bonded over our passion for carbs and our mutual dislike for gulls (greedy buggers), our conversations are mainly non-verbal, but they’re never short on drama and intrigue. Never a dull day in the park.
Duck feeding is part of my park routine. I stop by the Loafing bakery on Roman Road to pick up a stale loaf of bread from the day before, walk past Wennington Gardens, rush down the steps near the bridge and get on the canal. Turn left for Limehouse Basin (never), right for Broadway Market (always).
I take another picture of the big weeping willow on the other side of the canal to send to my mum. It’s always the same tree, but it seems to be a different colour every day. Today it’s shimmering silver. I learned to observe even the most imperceptible alterations in my surroundings - a helpful reminder during lockdown that time hasn’t stopped. The clock is still running.
I walk past a new coffee shop called Blue Ivy - which surprisingly only has pink and white furniture. I object to the decor, but the coffee tastes ok. I make my way to the small gate on the side of the pathway, jumping over the usual pond of mud, and I am finally here.
The park is not a park. It’s a point of convergence. The lives of E3 and E9 residents overlap and juxtapose like in a stage play - and the park is the stage. The darkness is the curtain but, even when the sun has gone down, the show still goes on.
It’s so close to where I live I sometimes refer to it as my back garden, but more than that, I think of it as “a significant spot”, the backdrop against which most of my adult life has unfolded, the only community in which I know how to exist.
So much life has been lived in this park, but I try to forget, to sever the links in my brain that make up the map of prejudices and habits I’ve built throughout the years. The park is a sanctuary, the tabula rasa, and I know better than to spoil it with an excess of memory.
If only Patricia could talk, the stories she’d tell you! Off the top of my head: Jessie and I reading the Sunday papers on a bench, Silvia trying to climb over the gate when the guards locked us in (it took her 15 minutes, but she got there). Atina celebrating her 24th birthday in typical Atina fashion (balloons, balloons, balloons - stress on the first syllable). A first date (“You just peed in a bush, Val, but I still kinda fancy you”), a last date (“My biggest dream is to make money. For what, you ask? Well to go on holiday of course!). The first, whiskey-soaked kiss (“But I thought you didn’t like me!”), me tearing up listening to a song about Amelia Earhart. A phone call from my sister (“The doctors say she’s not going to make it”).
The park is the place where things never stop happening, come hell or high water, summers and winters, lockdowns and reopenings. It acts as a reminder of the past, and a catalysis for the significant events the future holds.
I look at the lovely town houses: small doors covered in sage-green paint, pots of geraniums carefully placed on both sides of the stone pathways. It’s easier to look inside the windows at night: a floor lamp in a corner, a fireplace, a mantlepiece with abstract statuettes and a collection of vintage records. A hologram of the life I want.
The park makes it easier for me to envisage a future, to give it a shape, to borrow the lives of strangers while I try to make sense of my own. I am a thief: I watch the same people do the same things every day and when they cross the gates and head to their homes I fill in the gaps with my imagination, I close my eyes and I see the decades to come. Everything comes and goes, marked by lovers and styles of clothes - but not the park, the park stays where it is.
READING LIST
Novel: “Victoria Park”
Interview with the author Gemma Reeves
I found this book by chance, while browsing in a Waterstones in Westminster before my 11am shift. Predictably, the name of the book is the thing that drew me to it. It’s like finding out someone wrote a novel about your house… you kind of want to know what’s in it.
Once I bought it, I found out two of my friends already had it. Last to the party? Maybe. But it only came out this year, and it’s the author’s debut novel, telling the stories of twelve strangers over the course of a single year, their lives unfolding in and around Victoria Park.
From the mundane to unusual, the author is able to weave an intricate web of sub-narratives where ordinary becomes extraordinary, and once again the park is the catalysis for all these stories.
I spoke to Gemma about her novel and she kindly agreed to be interviewed for the Everything is Copy newsletter. She got the idea for the book when she worked in a pub by the park in her early 20s (she won’t say the name, but i have my theories). She explains: “I knew I wanted to write something which explored community in big cities, and why people seek it out, why other people reject it, and how very different people cohabit.”
The way Gemma intends the idea of community is very realistic even when explained through the lens of fiction, revealing an understanding of how the concept of community is too wide and personal to be pinned down: “I wanted to write about the different ways that people kind of leave indelible marks on other people’s lives as they're going through their ordinary days,” she says.
Gemma shows us an idea of a community where everything is always moving and changing, but the people who make up said community always have something to hang on to: each other, and the park. Not in that order.
Here in London, I have seen countless people come and go. I came to think of it as a port, a place of transit where people come to find themselves before heading to their final destination. So I cling on to what I know and what i can recognise, which is what i meant when I wrote “the park stays where it is.” It’s a landmark, the Eastern Star, something to look out for when I’m lost.
Similarly, Gemma turns the park into a character itself, a hero of sorts: “One character dips out, another character comes in and picks it up and the park is present, still changing or growing. But it lives on beyond all of these characters' lives.”
Hardback, £14.99/Paperback £8.99
WRITING
All that time taking pictures meant I used the park as a microscope under which I observed people’s lives with their million idiosyncrasies. Here’s my hilarious people-watching diary, Vicky Park edition. Link here.
“10:50
Man with man bun and faux leather trench coat and a New Yorker tote bag. He doesn’t know it – but today is trash collection day. You in danger, girl.”
VAL’S JUKEBOK
Just in case we needed a further reminder that we should keep a keen eye on MUNA - here’s a new, breezy, hopeful reminder that life can get heavy, so best to keep it light (like silk chiffon) if we can help it.
The park is the best place to contemplate the imminent end of the ‘‘fairest of the seasons”.
PHOTO SERIES
Pretend It’s a City
The park is my favourite subject - so here’s a series of pictures I took in and around the park last winter, in the depths lockdown. Click here to view the gallery on my blog.