On Wednesday Evan and I went to visit the newly refurbished Greenhead Park in Huddersfield.

Well, I say refurbished – it actually isn’t quite finished yet. But the playground is done and that’s obviously the most important bit. In fact playgrounds have loomed quite large in my life at the moment. Ready For Ten, one of the sites I do a bit of writing for, has recently been handing out massive grants to various dilapidated playgrounds across the country. Marvelous stuff.

They’ve not given any to Greenhead Park though, but that’s ok because it got money from the council and the lottery fund instead.

And they’ve done a rather good job of sprucing it up too. There’s separate areas for younger and older children to play without getting in each others way, and a multitude of sturdy and exciting looking equipment for kids to clamber over. There’s also a pretty intimidating looking slide, but Evan quite wisely decided that it was for bigger boys than he.

However, by far the biggest hit of the day for us was something that has been in the park since I was a child. The gigantic paddling pool.

I think I can count on the fingers of one hand how often I’ve actually seen this pool with water in it. Usually it’s just a dry concrete desert taunting passing children with it’s unfulfilled promise. But not this Wednesday. This Wednesday it was full to the brim with sparkling clear water.

We had no appropriate clothing for paddling. Evan was even wearing long trousers. But he and I are bold adventures and didn’t let that stop us. The pool is rarely full and the weather seldom hot and opportunities needed to be grasped. We made futile attempts to roll up trouser legs, but in the end we just let the water do it’s stuff.

We drove away damp, but we drove away happy.

The water was bloody freezing though.

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