I’m standing in the bathroom on the upper floor – you really don’t have to know what I’m doing – looking wistfully through the chartreuse-coloured cascade that is the weeping willow at the bottom of our garden and across the canal to Victoria Park. It is ‘just spring, when the world is puddle wonderful’ as American poet e.e. cummings once put it, and we can no longer enter it. Like pints after work and an evening at the theatre, our beloved park is just a memory. It’s encaged by tall iron gates.
