Parklife

The news won’t come as a surprise to everyone, considering the number of Twitter users who gamely shouted “Parklife!” at him recently, after Brand’s convoluted way of speaking was compared to the wordy verses of Blur’s song of the same name.

If you can shout “Parklife!” at the end of your sentence with the word “hippocampus” “or “fusiform gyrus” somewhere in the middle, there is a chance you’ve mastered neurobabble.

As an avid reader, but one who gave up academia years ago, parsing meaning from the dense descriptors occasionally left me ready to shout Parklife. But it’s also a book which says to the reader: make of this what you will. There are no polemics here, no dumbings down.

Guy Debord was undoubtedly a brilliant polemic thinker, whose essays included clever-sounding sentences like: "The introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences.*" * Parklife!

Up in the boughs, a literate London Tarzan. Down to earth, a woman on the wait. All part of parklife, give or take the ups and downs.

I feed the pigeons, I sometimes feed the sparrows too. It gives me a sense of enormous wellbeing. (Parklife!)

From the zoological garden, via the nature reserve and the theme-town, to the TV reality-show — sequences from the evolution of "parklife".

In Stockholm parklife, certain behaviours are framed as bad, unacceptable, or pathological by institutions such as the police and the social services.