Seacock, Sea Blanket

I saw Aunty Ed's friend Mavis on Saturday, who will also be 90 next year. She is the one who did a striptease for her friends on her 80th birthday. She is a fantastic woman, and tall and strong looking. I drove one of Aunty Ed's friends home to View St, and she told me that she knew my father's parents, Bruce and Lulu. Hobart is funny like that. And driving around I felt strange and sad, realising that it is all past, has all passed, and that I can't have whatever I was there. When I went to Ireland I had no idea what I was leaving. I didn't know it would be the end (or the beginning of the end) of so many things. It makes some of my final conversations with SD seem rather prophetic now. I said to her that I was scared that I would lose everything, and that there would be no place for me when I came back. She assured that everyone loved me and of course I would be wanted. But then she became a Muslim and didn't want me.

At Salamanca I felt uneasy, and sure that I would see someone I didn't want to (MP or family) in that idyllic family atmosphere. There were rugged bearded men in polar fleeces and women with dreadlocks and brown jumpers. This is what I love about Tasmanian folk - their inability, or unwillingness to be like other people, to follow fashion, to live fast lives, to be flashy, to be truly wealthy, to be totally connected to the rest of the world(???). It is a different place. And on the boat I (again) looked at the water and thought about connection to place/land and wondered about my alienated connection to the idea of Tasmania. Is it something that we Tasmanian folk are quite obsessed by? Or do some of us leave and never look back?

Dad talked about seacocks (things like taps that let water in and out of boats), and I laughed, and then we met a man who had a leaking seacock on his boat. And Dad showed me the sea blanket he has bought, which is used for ocean racing. You can wrap yourself in it in wet clothes and it will dry you and keep you warm. I loved it, and I said over and over "really?' because I can't quite believe that such things can exist.