Out of its box

Last summer, while waiting at the lights alongside a woman and her children, we saw on the traffic island opposite a young girl in a blue and white checked dress, pinned pinafore, red court shoes and careful, Judy Garland hair. Look Tarlana, the woman had then said to one of her children. It’s your Dorothy doll, like it just come out of its box.

The young girl – who, as it happened, was of Asian appearance as the newspapers put it – might not have heard the children’s exclamations as they passed each other crossing the road because, besides the usual noise of the street, whose decibel levels have been compared to a plane that is starting to taxi, the park towards which she was heading has been known for years as a haven for misplaced, forgotten and hard-to-control, small and irritable dogs.