If you are five or six or ten and in the playground. If you are sitting on the pale green wooden slatted forms outside the classroom eating your green apple with its juice on your chin or one of a pile of sandwiches and your body, your whole body is leaning into the playground where kids are running and fighting and toing and froing like cards in the wind and it is weird to put heavy food into your body because your body is made of skin and air. If you are waiting to swallow the last mouthful before your light body picks you up and tosses you into the air. If your cardigan has been knitted for you and you would recognise it anywhere in the world because it was knitted for you. If you are happy because your mother came to watch you run or happy because she didn't come or amazed because your father came too. If you think `I know the grass and I know the sky and I know the concrete' and the grass and sky and concrete would be different anywhere else. If you know this then you are alive.

If you believe your best friend when she tells you the dental nurse said you must have all your teeth out, if you believe her and fear runs through you like a pneumatic drill, and if you believe her the next time. If you are lying on the grass against the scaly manuka trunk crying because nobody likes you or you can't run fast enough or catch well enough, because you are scared to climb trees or scared to go home or you look funny. If you are curled around the scaly trunk of a manuka because you look funny and your crying is loud or silent but it is crying and you are wrapped around the trunk then you are really alive, really living. You are in a playground. You are a child of indulgent Gods who toss down sunshine and thunderbolts without rhyme without reason from their sky mountain. Once or twice you are close enough to them to bury your face in the snow below their feet, breathing holes into the white ice, and lifting your head you feel the sun bringing your face, your cold frozen face, back to life. It stings and prickles and glows when you come back to life, and then it is warm, your face, held up to the ultraviolet arc of sky, and only the faintest breath of the Gods, the clean icy page 13 puffs from their small indulgent laughter skims the warm surface of your skin. If you feel this laughter, this fear, this pain, then you are in a playground because these things happen in playgrounds.

Primary School. Primary. First. My first school, my first playground. No subsequent initiation was as liberating, as dangerous as cruel as wide as the initiation into the life and games of the playground. In the playground, everything was immediate and original: each of us recreated the world and it was a world made for children made of skin and air.

'Are you in Ryan's gang?'

'Yeah, I'm a spy for Ryan's gang.'

'Ryan didn't start that gang, I did, it's my gang.'

'You didn't start it Ryan did.'

'No! I started it. I thought it up. I started it.'

'Hey Ryan, he says he started the gang, he says it's his gang.'

'OK, he's not in the gang any more.'

'You can't kick me out I started it.'

'I can so. We can so kick you out eh?'

'OK OK, never mind about it let's just play.'

Fundamental.

When you jumped along the hopscotch squares you only felt your foot and leg and maybe your elbows against your waist. There was nothing much to lift up and sometimes it was hard to meet the ground. And getting the flat stone or piece of asbestos into the right square was easy after a while so you were in for ages

      hop
         hop
         hop
      ...      hop
         hop
      hop      hop
            and they all watched you, and then you watched them.

Basic.