ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND

I lived opposite a park. Where other kids had to beg their parents to take them, or latterly had to walk (or bike) through the dusty streets, all I had to do was cross the road and I was there.

Before there were the appeals of skateboards and girls in the park of course, there was always for me, the Adventure Playground.

I don't know if that's what they still call these places - Playparks? Apparatus? Play areas? Feel free to substitute whatever regional term works for you, wherever you might have grown up. For me 'Adventure Playground' feels almost exactly right, and I would like to explain why.

What I'm talking about is the specific fenced-off area inside a green park park. It's often floored with sand, or perhaps sawdust, to soften the inevitable bruises of tumbling children. When I was a kid, the surface was what we used to call 'wood-mulch' - a sort of grey, barky material that smelled tangy and went squidgy in the rain. The wood-mulch was like an ocean between the brightly painted wooden and plastic structures that towered over us like castles and palaces.

Oh! There were rope bridges, turrets, climbable walls and plastic tubes. There were tyre-swings and zip-wires, slides and platforms angling off into all directions - just ready for the imagination and the fun to begin. You could pretend to be pirates defending your treasure from marauders, or space men on alien planets. You could escape attack by hurling yourself down a slide, and race like crazy to safety on the other side of the mulchy sea. Or you could hide in the metal tubes (ignoring the smell of smoke and the rude words that had been etched into them).

It was all adventure, and all play. I never once thought of it as anything other than that - just an adventure playground. It never occurred to me that it was there to give parents a breather and provide free PE for their kids.

Oh, and let me tell you something else too. Rarely did any of us take our parents. That might seem strange these days, but as an eight year old, I was absolutely free to cross the road (via the pedestrian crossing) on my own and stay until the sun went down.

I'm not going down that nostalgic route, don't worry. It was still dangerous - there were splinters and strangers and big boys with cigarettes and haircuts. And I do have some stories.

It's occurred to me though, that those two things the Adventure Playground gave me as a kid, are actually two things I really do still need as an adult; two things I think we often undervalue, but are just hugely important. I'm not sure you can ever underestimate adventure and play, just as you can't live well without imagination and exercise.

Without imagination, what happens? We become boring - unable to think up stories, unwilling to go on adventures, unable to dream, unnerved by anything new.

Without exercise? We just get fat. Worse, we've trained ourselves to love food that's packed with sugar, but so often we don't have anywhere at all to burn it off.

So, where's our Adventure Playground?

I know. I'm being a little disingenuous - obviously an adults' adventure-land would be weird and unworkable. Obviously we spend our time working out how to fulfil both those needs differently without having it built for us in the local park. We can't all be Michael Jackson. And obviously there are gyms and books and Netflix and running clubs and the theatre.

I suppose what I'm saying is that it's easy to forget that pure thrill of being a kid on a pirate ship - that shiver of excitement at new Lego or shiny bikes. Or when you hear a story for the first time and you can't put the book down until you've finished it, lived through it, been on the adventure!

I happened to be in that park a few weeks ago, walking right by the metal fence that delineates the old Adventure Playground. A lot of the equipment has gone (victims of health and safety I reckon), but some of the castles and turrets and slides are still there. I saw kids hurling themselves across the rope bridge, dripping with sweat as they dropped into the wood-mulch, screaming with excitement.

On the benches, just inside the railings, parents sat next to pushchairs, and I noticed every one of them lost in a phone, captured by a marauder they must never have expected when they themselves were children.

I wanted to vault the fence, leap into action like a captain on the deck! But the sadness is that I grew up too - and it would have been a desperately inappropriate thing for a man of 42 to have done. And that I guess, is my point.