I grew up in a complete nothing area, a void of anything interesting that exists purely to have people kept alive and close enough to their offices, if you relate then you too may have grown up in a shitty commuter town!

Although I didn't live in the commuter town itself, I lived a little drive or most likely train away in a village, not really a village because it also suffered from being a commuter village, you lived there to go elsewhere. These areas are everywhere around big cities, and that's why big cities get filled with people who moved in from just outside to try and do something interesting and the outflow of interesting people makes the commuter towns even more boring.

Being from an area like this, I didn't have a coffee shop local to my house, the cinema, bowling alley and other regular dead town designated teenage areas were a drive away and most of my friends' houses were just far enough away you would need a lift to get there, so what I got was dog walks, loads of them.

I often joke that I'm from nowhere, and this is partially because of my intense shame about growing up in such a rich but also depressing place, but also because it's just on the edge of identities. Commuter towns or villages like mine aren't close enough to London to be anywhere near to calling yourself a Londoner, London was a place of Arsenal games, School Trips and Museums, but also not quite the countryside either.

Walking about twenty minutes from my childhood house and you would get into woods that went on for an hour or so, walk around them and you find yourself in genuinely agricultural areas that I would avoid either because you thought a farmer would shoot you or just because they seemed incredibly boring.

So when I went for walks around the immediate area, you had some fairly beautiful scenes, long stretches of quiet wood, sheep herding together with the sunset slithering behind the hills, small country roads that flowed like rivers disappearing deep and fast into hedgerows, and all the while that lovely gentle hum of an A-road nearby.

I appreciate these walks more and more as I've got older, but sitting with a friend the other day in West London I found something I appreciate even more.

I met my childhood best friend for coffee and a chat in West London where he lived until recently, I don't love West London, I think it's rich dickheads and then suddenly industrial estates but we made the best of it.

We walked for a bit and got coffee as we wandered into a park, it had been raining for a while and as it was only about ten in the morning it was still a bit cool out which we both enjoyed after a brutal summer for pasty men. We ended up in Chiswick Common where we had to avoid the first three or four benches because they were too covered in mess or bird shit and eventually sat on the furthest side of the park.

The park is quite vertical with Tennis courts on one side that have the Piccadilly line going over the top of them parallel to the park, the other side is residential that's a mainly pedestrian street.

We sat in the park for around three or four hours in the end, way more than either of us planned, the park provided more than enough for us to talk about.

We watched as dog walkers trundled through, a man trained his show dog jumping on and off of nearby benches with such an ease and calm that it made me actually think that dog shows could be cool for a second.

We watched the PE session play out in front of us and picked players to quietly cheer on in their under 8s football session, I explained to my footballphobe friend why I had such a strong disdain for some of the eight year olds style of play when they celebrated like professionals after scoring.

We watched them pack away and carry the goals like dutiful ants following obvious in-training PE teachers. We watched runners go past at a good pace and got discussing our plans that we made when we were seventeen.

We had talked at one point about following Che Guevara's path and riding motorbikes from one side of South America to another, we had planned various mountainous expeditions that never came with a few notable exceptions. We talked about just how emptily ambitious you could be when you had no obligations, although they were ridiculous at the time too, we genuinely felt it was possible to bike South America because what else were we doing! Now it felt like to go on a long trip you would have to cut a million threads that hold you where you are.

We talked about some of the trips we did actually do, like climbing Ben Nevis on a weekend then going back into school for Monday, but mainly we just aimlessly chatted like when we were seventeen and killing time during lunch. He showed me some musical pieces he was working on and some experimental music and I really almost "got it".

Maybe it's just the reaction of an ADHD-addled brain but that park bench has sold me on parks and benches forever, at no point did we feel bored, even when conversation got snuffed out by long sighs or after laughter pauses, the Piccadilly Line came every few minutes to give us a slow steady London metronome and the park was constantly presenting us with a slow moving feast of ideas and conversation under a surprisingly big sky for London, our bench felt perfectly placed to take in the show before us.

I don't want to completely cast off walks through fields or the joy of silent woods, but for where I am in my life and the way I feel things and talk to people I care about at the moment, I feel I'm here for London park benches much more than country walks.

The constantly moving London park gives you a perfect microcosm of London to lap up and absorb into your conversation in a way that beautiful countrysides just can't, it won't be for everyone, but I know that I look forward to spending several long unplanned hours on park bench again soon and I'm optimistic about the performance I'll receive from London's best entertainers.