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Note on Training  

Also from the Mill Hill Park group.  Today’s playgrounds for infants are Telly-Tubbily different from the iron assault courses where urban kids used to work out when I was a child.  The truly tiny were lucky if they had one swing their own size.  Older kids had high slides, peaking 20ft up; swings on which the chains slackened as they reached the horizontal, when our organs would swap places; horses, if that’s what they were, that seated ten and made everyone’s skull shoot to the top of its pole at each jolt; and, most dangerous of all—there must have been fatalities—roundabouts on or off which we jumped once they were going at a wall-of-death speed.  I think playgrounds and fairgrounds teach us geometry.

  

Alan Marshfield

  

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