Rabbits and such

The caravan site is remarkably quiet. A few stayers for the winter, including the obligatory converted truck complete with native American Indian exterior mural. It`s called Spirit of the Wind no doubt . A chap who has a Hansel and Gretel stove pipe sticking out of the top of his touring `van`s roof. Do these people qualify as travellers? What does that mean exactly? Down in the `moat`, a row of Hobby motorhomes which have sprouted gardens - paving slab patios, garden furniture, a solar lighted wishing well. An air of temporary permanence. It isn`t quite a community.

Yesterday, one of the site workers ambling past swinging a dead rabbit by the feet. I wasn`t upset. Dangling from a strap slung over his shoulder, a brown rabbit-sized tube which may have been a humane trap. At any rate, it wasn`t a lunch box or a gun.

We swam a lot over the weekend. The water 32 degrees, and slick like warm milk. I was in a crisis state. I always swim furiously when drowning. The freedom of movement made me happy; dancing I was, with a frantic need to feel my body unrestrained. If I could sprout a fluked tail that`d be as good as it could get. Hobble hobble hobble. I`m no good on land right now. I`m not even that good at being a human right now. I really can`t accept the fact that I can`t walk for more than five or ten minutes without limping, twisting into a shape I am still refusing.

Saturday was short, and I was bad company. Sunday found me in a more gracious mood, apologetic and meaning it. The weather was great, for the time of year. But being together in any sense is problematic right now. Do I want isolation? No. What I want is a genuine sense of wholeness, and it`s not there even though a dear friend said when we met last week that I looked/seemed `integrated`. The problem? A sense of ... something ... I keep trying to describe to myself in my head and get bamboozled. Not watching myself as if elsewhere at the time, not that. It`s like a window keeps opening on a view I am older than. A window keeps opening on a scene or scenes and I`m acutely aware of it`s /their transience, but the quality of this awareness
is perplexed and unlucky and maybe it is just a good ol` disassociative state. I haven`t been able to nail it yet, in words, not trying to describe it to myself, or in print. It feels like a kind of Jonah sensation.

Today I am getting by by making lists. These always get me through to some extent. And I smile dubiously thinking about Plymouth of late, or at least the news ... an unexploded bomb dug up from beneath the old NAAFI building which forced the evacuation of the Holiday Inn, followed closely by a fire at the same hotel which forced another evacuation, and then the utterly weird episode of the emptying National Marine Aquarium tank, which shed tons of water over night, causing the death of 200 fish, despite `several fail safes` which obviously weren`t. The Barbican/Hoe area some kind of psychic blackspot.

Today the sun is good. The view is not peculiar or fractured by my ongoing oddness. Phew. Hurrah. I am actually looking forward to Christmas and lots of visitors, because it`ll very probably help.