Juneathon 2011 Day 16: A Wet Skate Park

2011 Streak Day 167/365: Walk - 4.42 miles, Time - 1hr 25min, Weather - wet

Reflected Graffiti

No sooner do we announce a drought in Eastern England and devote newsprint to climatic problems than it starts to rain. Today was another day of solid steady rain, not hard, just soft and steady - the best kind.

I rather like walking in this type of rain. There is a gentleness to the landscape, a blurring of the edges and a vividness to the greens. I like it as long as I am away form the edge of the pavement when cars drive through puddles, soaking one side of my trousers.

Apart from that the walk was good. I looked at the way water formed droplets of different size and shapes of different leaves and took photos. But recently my photos have been mostly green so today I wanted a different colour palette. As a result it is  graffiti mirrored in the pool, which formed at the bottom of the half pipe in the skateboard park.

Unsurprisingly there were no skaters or BMXers to be seen.

Graffiti here does not upset me as it almost seems appropriate, almost part of the culture. However in other places I get quite annoyed. So much of it is witless and unskilled. So much of it despoils the appearance of a neighbourhood. Mostly it is feckless.

Recently I have noticed an increase in this sort of graffiti and I am really quite puzzled as to why. I thought is was something of the 80/90s, which had faded. So why would it come back? Why has this way of making a mark been rediscovered?

But things do go in cycles and this skate park is a good place to see that. BMX bikes were big in the 90s but then faded but now they are back and it seems more kids are riding them than skateboards. Yet a few years ago skaters were the cool group.

This of course is nothing to do with me. Youth fashion is what youth fashion does and that is all there is to it. All I can do is observe what I see around me and hope that whatever the fashion is, it is not destructive.