Part I. Big skies, small minds

It was a mad scheme. Completely bloody mad. Let me tell you something. You don’t know nothing about the history of playgrounds, and you don’t know nothing about children. Here’s what it is. Kids don’t need to be told what to do. That’s the first thing, before Dogboy and the Architect and bloody impact attenuating surfacing and all the rest of it get involved. That’s the starting point. Non-directed play. Non-directed. No direction. Do whatever the Dickens you want. Climb a slide backwards. Have a tea party and use the swings as hanging tables. Bloody, I don’t know, lie on the ground.

It was all about giving kids freedom, actually, but you’d never get that from the papers. No. All they want to write about is corruption in local government and the Labour party living in glass houses and you know what it’s a declining industry anyway and I for one don’t give a single, solitary piece of shit. Mind my French. They can all go out of business for all I care. Wouldn’t wipe my arse with the dross they call journalism.

Dogboy? I actually feel for the guy. Let me tell you something. He wasn’t a stooge like they said and he wasn’t in it for money, and how do I know this well because we never paid him any money. Not any more money, that is to say. Not any more money than he would have got for doing the job in the first place, the inspection. ...