What makes such a place eerie?
- A place, like this, unfamiliar.
- The only human sounds are far off shrieks, and you’re hemmed in by the screams of insects.
- Everything is coated in a layer of dust.
- Discarded cigarettes, feathers and condoms.
- Repetitive graffiti.
- A playground with no children in.
- Water features with no water in.
- A woman crouched over her bags in the middle of the path.
- A man on crutches with a crooked leg.
- A jogger with red jogging bottoms and a bumbag.
- No shade.
- A woman hauling a trolley of huge plastic thread bags, and leading more ahead of her, berating the world.
- A man drying his clothes over bushes in the sun.
- Two men furtively gathered around a water pump.
- The pigeons are slim and toned; some are white, like ghost pigeons.
- Statues and busts of dead men with mustaches, carved in bleached white stone.
- The distant sound of traffic, surrounded by walls.
- Swedish Security private security guards, but only at the entrance, as if cowering.
- People with apparently nothing to do and apparently nowhere to do it.
- Dog walkers making it around as fast as they can.
- No wind.
- Lamps on lamp posts, with dead bulbs.
- Stickers that have been peeled off.
- Empty churches.
- Empty pleasure gardens.
- Row upon row of empty benches.
- Air you can swallow for a full meal.
- Solitary butterflies.
- Last year’s fallen leaves.
- Trees wilting in the heat.
- A man in a clean white shirt and shorts, with a satchel and a neatly trimmed bald patch, carrying in one hand a takeaway coffee and in the other a pastry inside a paper bag, walking briskly past a guy in an old baseball cap with his arms crossed lying on a flower-pattern torn bedsheet on a park bench with one single shopping bag at his feet and a discarded milk bottle cast aside.
- A couple talking in hushed voices; she turned to him, leaning back relaxed, he looking away in sunglasses, wound up with everything folded.
- A man in an orange fluorescent sports shirt cycling puffily up the long incline on a mountain bike that could do with a touch of oil.
- A distant cough.
- An abrupt break in the insect chatter.
- Catching a deep sweat after walking for only five minutes.
- The sight of a man sighing deeply, and then turning to receive a kiss.
- My part in it all.
Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed my eerie drift around the park.