My Place: A park for all seasons

Every Thursday my grandmother would take me to feed the ducks. We didn't live in the Parks in Johannesburg. My grandparents were in Dunkeld so it was a big thing for her to backtrack across the city to Sandown to pick me up and purr up our hill of a driveway in her gigantic maroon Valiant - yes, Granny drove the only one in South Africa (crushed grape on the outside, pristine white leather seats inside).

I remember feeling lost within those vast seats and not being able to see over the dashboard. Probably because of this limitation in watching the world sail past, we would, as if by magic, arrive at the tree-lined, cool-shaded oasis of Zoo Lake.

On arrival, from under the seat a gold-ringed hand would fish out a dodgy plastic packet, scratching with breakfast crumbs and scraps that would have been saved up over the week. I don't remember the details - the wandering down, or what we spoke about. As soon as I could confidently sit on a horse, Thursdays changed to my aunt's livery in Kyalami, so I must have been very young when we made our special trips to the lake.

For this reason I think of the time as even more ethereal. Like the dappled sun of my very early years, the ducks, the smell of the softly lapping, slimy water, strangers and my ever stoic, tall, Germanic grandmother combine to make it a memory that sits apart from all else I knew when growing up.

Now I take my daughter. I know she won't be able to remember the details. I'm not even sure if she'll remember any part of our visits, but being an inherent farm girl, it is the closest, easiest way we can get to nature within this rumble, tumble, brash, bombastic city.

It helps that there are no cars, that it is a pedestrian promenade. If we go for a run in the morning everyone is civil - from workers using the lake as an easy transverse path to housewives and home help walking small dogs. Everyone says good morning.

In the afternoon schoolchildren, teenagers really, huddle in the bushes smoking and kissing. They're less friendly.

My family has a special connection with the park. Granny's father planted the trees that line Saxonwold's streets. He created the magic city garden at the bequest of Hermann Eckstein - the magnate who originally owned Braamfontein farm, a portion of which he gifted to Johannesburg as a site for the zoo and what is now Zoo Lake.

Eckstein's proviso was that the site remain multiracial - even through the dark years of apartheid.

The other morning I noticed a sign I'd never seen before: ''Please respect the enjoyment of others! No alcohol and no music."

I wonder when it was put up. Anyone who has ever been near the park on the weekend knows not a soul takes any notice. On Saturdays and Sundays scores of South Africans descend with picnics and braais, setting up camp for a jolly good day out.

Some people tsk-tsk at the rowdiness - probably the same people who don't realise most South Africans live without a garden, and the chance to spread out under great-grandpa's trees makes for a special kind of happy freedom.

I, and I'm sure many others, would, however, like it if less mess was made. Rubble from the braais seems to drift into the thick and murky lake waters. Those poor ducks I fed as a toddler are now forced to eat much more gunk than was ever in Granny's bag of scraps.