Football not happening at the Lockway

As the lockdown has changed our soundscapes I have begun to return to the locations of the recordings I made for my grassroots football project Get Rid! One of the categories of recording I made for these was 'football not happening' - the sound of parish council pitches and village recreation grounds sounding in the absence of football. The first recording I made was at Brightwell Recreation Ground having headed there to listen to Didcot Eagles playing in the North Berks League I found that the game had been postponed and I could only record the absence of football rather than its presence. The recordings I am now making on Saturday afternoons are a way of marking our changed soundscape and noting the similarities and differences. The drone of tyres on asphalt has gone, as has the majority of the air-traffic. There are fewer vibrations in the air. This recording was made using a Sound Devices 722 and an AT BP4025. I wasn't sure whether to upload a normalised version of the track but assuming listeners will use headphones I have gone for the straight bounce on this occasion as it seems more comparable with the original recording that I made. In previous recordings of the Lockway the sound of the A34 flooding down the embankment and across the neighbouring fields is oppressive, continuous, intense. On this recording there is light and shade, presence and absence. You can hear children playing in their back gardens, a family having a kick-about on the pitch, wood pigeons in the trees to the South, bike tyres on the car-park gravel.