I saw a fox today. It climbed on top of a pile of rubble and walked around a little bit and then climbed down on the other side. It wandered around for a little while and then it ran back towards a fence and then I lost sight of it behind several mounds of earth.
On a Sunday afternoon on this type of land in India, an open space adjacent to a building site but yet to be used for building, you’d find a bunch of little children who have somehow managed to find their way inside and playing cricket or some other sort of game. But in England, presumably due to safety restrictions, the site is impenetrable or maybe it’s just that people don’t let their children play in such places. A fox somehow is able to access the place but that might just be because nobody is stopping the fox.
It does seem a pity when there’s so much open space that it’s going to be used eventually as the base for rather ghastly apartment blocks in soulless buildings. At least for a little time it might have provided a nice place for children to explore. Of course there are safety considerations but there’s a lot of space where there isn’t much harm that can happen unless you venture very close to big piles of brick packages or other heavy objects. And it’s not like there is dangerous heavy machinery in operation, it’s not like it’s the actual working building site. There isn’t really much more danger than there is simply crossing roads and avoiding other obstacles in everyday life.
It would be so much fun to climb up these mounds of earth and there are places to hide and play in all kinds of ways that would not be possible in a cultivated urban park. But alas on a rather good, clear Sunday in November, this building site lies quite empty and unused, except, briefly, by a fox.