the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Yesterday, I visited Golders Hill Park. It was the first time I had been there. Because, despite having lived a few miles away from it for most of my life, until a few days ago I was completely unaware of its existence. I can see why. It’s great and I imagine that the people who use it want to keep it that way. I’d keep quiet about it it too.  It has has a great view looking down onto Central London, a rose garden, a butterfly enclosure, a small zoo, and tennis courts.   All in all, a hidden gem. Seemingly content for nearby Hampstead Heath to get all the attention whist it quietly gets on with being ignored. 

It was also my last time going there. I won’t be going back. And its not on account of the slope. As mentioned, yes, the view, is wonderful, but in order to look down on something, one has to be above it which necessarily means a slope up and equally, a slope back down. Slopes are not easy for me to navigate. Downhill, my walking aid becomes difficult to control and uphill  sometimes my support worker has to help push me up. And it wasn’t because of the cafe. And not on account of It being a mostly cafe either;  inasmuch as the sandwiches were mostly bread, the salads were mostly lettuce and the cake portions were so small that they were mostly the plates they were served on. 

I mean I can choose to go up or down a slope just as much as I can choose to eat in a cafe or not. What I can’t choose to do however, is whether I need to to go to the toilet or not. 

The disabled toilet I used at Golders Hill Park wasn’t just  appalling. I’m used to appalling by now. So much so that I just kind of accept it and wish I didn’t have to. But this was on a whole other level. The walls weren’t just dirty – this wasn’t the kind of of dirt that hot soapy water, a sponge and some elbow grease could wipe clean – this was deeply ingrained dirt. The kind of dirt that only years of neglect have created.  The kind of dirt that blackens the wall under the hand-dryers so much that I thought, ‘Who would use that. Obviously the kind of person who saw the state of the taps, the sink and the soap dispenser and thought, Yeah, I’ll touch those with my bare hands. That seems like a good idea. They’ll be nice and clean afterwards.’

There were the old cobwebs. Everywhere. On the door hinges,  the window frames and high up in the corners. Miss Haversham would’ve been right at home. Whatever ‘cleaning’ had ever been done gave desultory a new meaning. The floor looked more like the changing room after a rugby match than an amenity for the public to use, the bins were so overflowing that people had clearly thought, ‘ I’ll just cut out the middle-man.’ and started using the floor instead. One might almost think that the whole thing was an installation Tracey Emin. The whole place stank of…well it was a toilet, what do you think it stank of?

My resolve to do what I needed to do as quickly as possible was secondary to my fear of any bare flesh of mine touching  the surfaces. To this end I thickly carpeted to the toilet seat with tissue paper before use.  I used tissue paper to turn the taps on and off and I used yet more to open the door to exit. Why would a door handle  get special treatment when everything else didn’t?

And therein is the problem. Who it is that gets special treatment and who it is that doesn’t? Golders Hill Park is run by the Corporation of London (CoL)  That would be the same Corporation of London (CoL) which has been embroiled in a long running legal battle over its decision to allow trans-women – deluded men – into the Women’s Pond at Hampstead Heath. 

Taking a leaf out of the Pontus Pilate guide to buck passing, the CoL held a ‘public’ consultation on the matter. Of the 36,000 people who took part, 86% favoured the policy continuing. It didn’t seem to occur to the CoL that this was perhaps evidence of a well organised campaign by activists determined to getting their way, as opposed to the genuinely held beliefs of the women who used the pond. It served its purpose though, and provided the necessary illusion that the CoL needed.

I’ve tried to to find out how much the CoL have spent defending a legally settled matter – the Supreme Court ruled that in  law,  a‘man’ is defined as being someone who was born biologically male and a ‘woman’ is defined as someone who was born biologically female –  but to no avail. But ultimately, it is less about how much money is actually spent, but more on what that money is spent on that matters. The fact is that if they’re spending money on one thing – fighting a court case that they’ll lose anyway – then someone at the CoL has deemed it a better use of public money than cleaning toilets. I know that this isn’t exactly the way budgets work, but still. Granted, its more ‘sexy’, more ‘progressive’ and more likely to garner approving headlines in the kind of newspapers the CoL leadership wants to be approved by. By contrast, the CoL knows very well that a campaign by disabled people demanding that that the toilets in Golders Hill Park be properly cleaned, maintained and inspected by them on a regular basis is unlikely to happen. Even if it did, it might get story in a local newspaper, maybe a brief segment on local TV news, but beyond that? 

It seems that we are now livening in a world in which enough people claim that there is an injustice and if these claims are backed up not just by emails or angry letters but by boots on the ground, the greater the likelihood of  their demands being met. It’s a grotesque inversion of the notion of inclusivity,  if it involves treating delusional men as women and pandering to their delusion at the literal expense the physically disabled. Biological reality is biological reality. One can’t wish it otherwise, no matter how much some trans-women feel it in their boners.