Oakwood to Harehills

Last week there was a photograph in the newspapers of Tory leader David Cameron pushing a rather large child in a pushchair.

This provoked a storm of Harrumphing from lots of people, including, it must be said, me.

It was all along the lines of It Never Happened In My Day. No Wonder There Are So Many Obese Children.

But, of course, I can see why people do it. If the child is in a pushchair, he or she is far easier and more convenient to move around. The parents are often busy and trying to get from one place to another quickly and a dawdling toddler would slow them down mightily. And I can quite see why a wandering child and traffic-filled streets don't really mix.

When I was a child, my mother hadn't learned to drive, so either we got the bus, or we walked. Sometimes I enjoyed the walk, such as when we walked through Gledhow Woods and I could look at the flowers and birds and think about making dens.

Sometimes, however, I hated it. The walk that I particularly hated was from Oakwood to Harehills.

Oakwood is a suburban shopping area with woodland - yes, probably oak trees, in fact, the clue's in the name - and a kind of square with a clock: it's very pleasant.

Harehills may have hills but hasn't seen a hare in decades - it's very urban, nearer the city centre. It used to be the most densely-populated area in Europe: that probably isn't still true, but nevertheless, it's crowded and I didn't like it.

My grandparents used to live in Harehills, in some spanking new Sixties flats that had to be demolished a mere twenty years or so later as they were dropping to bits. In fact my family lived there too when I was small, in Lawrence Road, which calls itself Oakwood sometimes but I know it's really Harehills.

The shoe shop that we went to was in Harehills when I was little, and my incentive to go to the shoe shop - apart from new shoes, which I quite liked - was the shop next door, which sold ice-cream cornets with a sticky sweet topping in them, which I very much liked.

However, to get to the shoe shop we would get a bus to Oakwood and then walk down Roundhay Road, along where the tram track used to be, to Harehills.

I suppose it's about half a mile or perhaps a bit more. To me, it was the most boring walk in the world.

There were shops for a while, and then Gipton Woods on your left - but we never went into them - and traffic on your right. It seemed to take forever. Things do, when you're little. Interminable is a word with a lot of meaning when you're small and doing something dull and wish it would stop.

I didn't try to wander off, or run out into the traffic - I wasn't that sort of child. But I bet I did a lot of complaining and "Are we there yet?" And I bet my poor mother wished she could stuff me in a pushchair and go at twice the speed. But light folding pushchairs didn't exist in those days, it was your huge, heavy Silver Cross pram or nothing, so toddlers and young children tended to walk.

I expect it was good for me, all that walking. I enjoy walking now. Sometimes, when I'm doing medical roleplay at St James's Hospital, I even walk from Oakwood to Harehills. It's still boring. But at least it's my choice.