by Philip Hall
Richmond Park is not far away from us. It’s easy to reach it and to walk in it. We enter by the Kingston Gate and from there walk to the Ham Gate. At the Ham gate there is a small pond.
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When I begin my walk I am usually concentrating on my breathing and trying to ignore the pain of muscles warming up. I used to laugh at people who used a stick, but then I found, somehow, that a using stick gives me lots of extra power and balance.
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It is not as if I only walked a few times through Richmond Park. Sometimes I walked through it for a whole month, through the summer. In spring. In autumn. In winter.
You walk through and it’s hard to take it all in. The place is full of so many different plants and trees. I spend some time wondering about their names.
We like to picnic in it. To celebrate birthdays.
Every now and then we walk parts of the North Downs Way
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In summer I always arrange to go to the pub with Anthony. Last year he was very fit. He left his job as an administrator in a college and went to work lugging bags of cement in a construction company.
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Phil Hall is a university lecturer. He is a committed socialist and humanist. Phil was born in South Africa where his parents were in the ANC. There, his mother was imprisoned and his father was the first journalist from a national paper to be banned. Phil grew up in East Africa and settled in Kingston-upon-Thames. He has also lived and worked in the Ukraine, Spain and Mexico. Phil has blogged for the Guardian, the Morning Star and several other publications and he has written stories for The London Magazine.
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