Two stops from the station the bus has come to a jolting halt in the middle of the road so the driver can argue, furiously and unintelligably, with an unknown voice. I shift in my seat and stare out over the scrubby grass of Finsbury Park. The dust smeared windows and pale early evening sunlight have bleached the colour from the outside world. Trees, roads and buildings drained into olive, grey, chalk, faded like a forgotten baby picture; my father watching in sideburns and pointed collar as I kick a ball with one plump leg, bright colours not invented until the eighties.

Just inside the gates, a young Asian family spread out yellow bath towels and look about nervously before settling themselves shyly on the ground. The woman, no more than twenty, brings out a tightly wrapped, newborn baby from beneath her shawl and lays it gently on the long white skirts that have fanned out around her. She takes the hand of the man and they sit gazing at the sleeping child in smiling silence.

A small child of four or five stands squarely over another young boy crumpled up at his feet at hits him repeatedly around the head with a shimmering red frisbee; the touch of colour shocking in the washed out landscape.

A short, solid man in a faded brown suit and thick, patched overcoat lies stretched out on his stomach with his face pressed into the grass. He clutches a cheap plastic bag between his hands, arms held taut and still above his head, and does not move. A literal and devoted sun worshipper, perhaps, or simply too drunk or ill to be disturbed until dark.

A few metres from his head, the bare feet of another man. This one young and pale, lying stiffly on a silky bedspread that blooms with huge blue and pink cabbage roses. Naked except for a tiny black thong, he stares unblinking at the sky and drums his fingers on the grass as if awaiting a promised event, or impatient for a tan.

A glittering spray of glass suddenly arcs out across the pavement beneath me and when I step off the bus there is a man sitting limply on the pavement near the smashed windscreen, head in bleeding hands, breathing hard. The glass crunched under my feet as I walk towards another stop, another bus, and glancing back towards the park I see only the red of the child's toy moving up and down, up and down.