…they chained up the swings on Sundays because breeze-in-face smiling would lead us into temptation and they couldn’t afford to pay Parkie overtime
and they cleaned up the crisp bags and empty tubes of glue once a week because they wanted to save our souls and because the locals had petitioned the council for three years and they didn’t know what else to do with the YOPs kids but arm them with blunt rakes and rubbish bags and send them out to battle our need to breathe a different world
and they cleared the white dog-shit and dunkies from the alleyways every September without fail, except during The Winter of Discontent (which lasted, roughly, from 1957 until 1982)
and they even threw ELO at us (although, to be fair, they also gave us Ziggy because no-one – not even them – could expect us to live in Enfield without at least one lightning stripe of transcendence)…
Ah, the old days. They tried their best not to give us Schubert or Ted Hughes or Goya because they knew we’d never, ever have been good enough.