ohope

It is quite nice to be sitting in the camp site and observing the surrounding sites as they are vacated and reconstructed. It is not unlike sitting in a restaurant for several hours watching tables be filled and emptied and filled. Or sitting at a bus stop and watching the bench's occupants fluctuate between a lone would-be passenger and several suits clustered awkwardly around the shelter.

The row we are camping in is numbered 54. There are sites in all four directions. I like that the neighbours on our right are assisting the newly arrived neighbours on our left to arrange their six-by-eight patch of grass. I enjoy watching the half-erected tent flap defiantly in the remainder of last night's storm winds and I like the way that the tent sits incongruous to the yellow rectangular stains left by the previous holiday-makers. I take comfort in the illusion of our campsite's permanence in comparison to the seemingly temporary state of the changing sites around us. Our site has pseudo-permanence: a self-defensive state induced by a subjective outlook.

Some of the spaces here are permanent. Really permanent. They are the communal buildings: The reception. The convenience store next to the reception. The toilets and shower blocks and change rooms. The swimming pool and its child-friendly-coloured plastic water slides. Yet even these spaces suffer the ebbing of people from week to week.

The life savers’ watch post is not permanent. It is neither actually permanent nor pseudo-permanent. It is a small white cabin with 0800 CABINS painted on the side. It is really a box building on trailer that has been wheeled up the sand dunes and perched there for the life savers to sit in. I imagine it’s like a sauna of sexual tension in there. Is it an issue that the life-savers are impermanent? My life can only be saved sometimes. Six hours a day, three months a year.

But I think that even the life savers are pseudo-life savers. One of them in there today looks younger than me – maybe sixteen? – and is too small for his red and yellow striped shorts. Looking out at the vicious muddy sea which has ripped jellyfish into pieces and strewn the bits along the sand, and then looking back at the boy whose job it is to save me from a similar peril, I am doubtful of his ability to save my life. He is a pseudo-life saver. But it is ok. Because I am a pseudo-holiday maker and I don’t feel like swimming today.

Today I made myself a holiday rule. The rule is this: I must use the toilets in order beginning with the left cubicle and working to the right cubicle, then rotating back to the left cubicle. There are five in total. So far I have used the three on the left although I suppose the ‘third’ cubicle is really the centre.

I don’t know why I made this rule. It is useless practically. It doesn’t advantage me emotionally or physically or mentally. It doesn’t improve my sanitation or make me less likely to trip over the “wet floor sign”. It won’t help me avoid the cubicle which has run out of toilet paper. It could be a sign of extreme boredom but I don’t think it is that. I think I made the rule to augment my use of one of the few permanent structures here. To reassure myself, when I repeat the circuit, that the cubicle is still there and pretty much – more or less – how I left it.