Read on Twitter
About the photographs of police apprehending people sitting, at a distance from others, outside - it's a really grim, productivity-is-king idea that to get benefit from fresh air & public spaces one must be RUNNING through them & stacking up numbers or it is functionally useless.
One of the things that has made me most angry during this period is actually the tweets from commentators who you can absolutely guarantee have their own garden tutting at people sitting down in public parks. You can really feel inequal access to land in them.
Can these people even comprehend what it is like for those who live in small spaces without ownership of their own parcel of land? For the people who can't retire to their back gardens with a glass of wine whenever they please, but who RELY on public parks for fresh air?
When I was growing up in a flat without a garden I used to lie on my bedroom floor so I could look at the sky through my window. I don't want to jog through the park. I want to sit down and feel the lack of walls around me, and breathe in fresh air, for the sake of mental health.
The lack of understanding of mental health, and the lack of understanding of what it is like to live in small spaces, and the lack of class diversity in the media, is really jumping out in these takes of 'you shouldn't be sitting down eating chips! that's not exercise!'
