I was going to use my Sunday afternoon in the same way I used my Sunday morning. Sat with the curtains closed in my bedroom under electric light sticking little bits of paper onto other little bits of paper - I would have continued doing this until all the paper that needed to be stuck to paper had been stuck to paper. It was quite sunny outside though so by about 3 o'clock I decided to don my straw hat and sunglasses and have a brief walk in Chorlton Waterpark - find some shade, phone my mum for a bit, do a little bit of design work for my exhibition. I realised in the early stretches of the Water Park that it would be difficult to avoid large groups of people, so I scampered up a little steep hill and sat up there and proceeded with my tasks. It was an unpopulated and ignored area of the park with no discernible pathways and no people, just lots of plants.
So it got to a point I'd done all I needed to do - which didn't take long - I considered going on a familiar walk down the usual paths but when heading in that direction I was instantly bored and nearly stepped on a few wandering dogs - too much hustle and bustle for a clumsy type like me, I think boredom can enhance my clumsiness so I headed back homeward but got slightly bored on my way back down such a dull familiar path - so I scrambled back up the steep hill and ventured into the dense vegetation. It took me back to my early teens, when I went into Edlington Woods on my lunch break as it was the perfect place to talk to oneself and think, also the best place to avoid the melting pot of children, all learning social survival instincts and pack mentality. It was also a good place to develop a split personality, so the thoughts in your head would actually become like a different individual perched on a throne in your cerebral cortex screaming to get out and making petty sarcastic remarks - like discovering a secret imprisoned soul that's been smothered for the past decade but it's reawakening ready to become real and as a consequence making you as a person more real..... well.... depending on your perspective this new presence may make you seem less real - but then at the time I wasn't so much aware of everyone else's subjective viewpoints, my own viewpoint was like a rollercoaster swooshing past all the sights and sounds of real life so therefore not being able to take part. Boo hoo.
Anyway I completely digress.... as I made my way through the thistles and thorns I was thinking about how much I like exploring ignored areas of woodland, and how it would be unlikely to find any burnt out cars hidden in Chorlton Waterpark like the ones I used to see all the time in Edlington Woods - because Edlington is well dodgy and Chorlton is well nice.
I carried on with my rambling ramble stepped over dead trees and branches grabbing a useful stick on my way and within a minute, perhaps two (who's counting?) I came across a burnt out car. It wasn't just burnt out either - it was also crashed into a tree. Result.
I was pretty surprised because this place is such a fun family orientated area - but then I suppose at night time it's not about that anymore - it's about dogging and burning stolen cars for insurance claims. I used to know a man in Scarborough who used to take up missions of pretending to steal a car, burning it and then sharing a cut of the insurance money with the owner - he didn't spend the money on anything useful though, within 24 hours all the money would be spent on his fruit machine addiction because he couldn't "resist the bright lights". Anyway I took a few photos of this car here:
And whilst I was playing detective I also found the empty container of gasoline used to burn the car - presumably after crashing it into a tree. Because cars don't always explode when you crash them.
I saw another burnt out car just a few feet away on on my way towards having a look I randomly found:
An old, rusty and mangled kitchen sink! I really didn't see that coming.
I continued my detective game at the next car and found out the gangs name:
I deduced through my complex sleuth skills - reading - that the gang, group or organisation that destroyed these machines and threw in everything including the kitchen sink (just for good measure) is known as M21 - which is the post code of Chorlton - so it's good to know that even in the slightly more idyllic left wing and slightly posher areas of suburbia there are people who burn cars and mangle sinks. It makes me feel much more at home knowing for a fact that this sort of thing is going on. I like that they named themselves after a postcode, it reminds me of E17.
You may have noticed that I gave the cars a good lookaround. This isn't because I have any massive interest in cars, I actually don't like them at all, it's more because I was looking to see if there were bodies inside. Not because I'm some sort of ghoul just because it's probably the sort of things you should check for. I didn't actually get into the cars but maybe I would if I were wearing protective gloves and clothes which weren't so lovely. Here are the rest of the photos of the second car:
I took my leave of the wreckages knowing that there would be unlikely anything more interesting to find and rambled through the woods until I found the exit to the park - very near to which I found something else unusual for the area:
Two very large and very nearly geometrically placed perfectly square sponges. This one, I think, is surely the work of the government or some secret cabal or society. Or maybe a homeless person put it together as a rudimentary bed.
Well I'm back home now about to start sticking bits of paper onto other bits of paper again in preparation for sticking the stuck on bits of paper to even bigger bits of paper. I'm good at sticking bits of paper to bits of paper but perhaps I'd make a better living as an adventurer - knight errant or errant fool? There is an interesting world out there though, and things that I can make the effort to find that no one else would normally come across, or even find interesting. I should probably take to the road one day with some sort of quest.
