I started reading a book yesterday about otroverts - not introverts nor extraverts - and whilst I wouldn't categorise myself as such, I started wondering how and when I changed from a generally happy and gregarious person into a generally unhappy and introverted person. I thought that there might have been a clue in my various blogs about Habonim; there wasn't, but reading between the lines here and there did give me a hint.
Until I left school in 1973, whilst I might have kept my Bristol and Habonim lives separate, I was fairly integrated with the other boys at school. Apart from our studies, we had sports along with progressive rock and/or folk music in common, and externally at least I was the same as the others. Then came the year 1973-41 in Israel, during a war, with people who were supposedly similar to me but often as different as chalk and cheese, and often a few years older. If that were not enough, I then spent the next four years as a schizophrenic: during the days, I would be with people with whom I had very little (if anything) in common, either at university2 or during the two work periods, whereas in the evenings and weekends I would be with my movement friends. Then I emigrated and discovered that life on a kibbutz was not the idyll that I expected.
Reading through those blogs about Habonim, I had two more memories that I hadn't written about previously. First, cooking3: for reasons of kashrut, we didn't have meat at camp. For breakfast, all I remember is corn flakes, bread with jam, and tea. For lunch and supper, we rotated through a meal based on eggs, one on cheese and one on fish. The egg meal was probably some type of flan and the cheese was probably cauliflower cheese, but I don't remember what kind of fish dishes we made. In the summer, everything was cooked over gas rings, so there weren't that many options. On Friday nights, the leaders would serve us salami on paper plates as a treat, although I don't think that I liked this very much. Paper plates also meant that there wasn't much cleaning up to do.
At the camp in 19714, after a few days in bivouac tents, we reverted to a more familiar format. In the next day or two, I 'got off' (as the ugly expression has it) with a girl, at a speed that somewhat surprises me now (that was when I was gregarious). A day or two later, because it had been raining, we were playing games in the big marquee where we used to eat and have evening activities together when we weren't outside. I remember I was running around the marquee then something happened although exactly what I don't remember: either I slipped, or I ran into the tent pole in the middle of the marquee or maybe something else, but suddenly I was stunned and fell to the floor, as if someone had given me a huge punch to the stomach. I was helped to the medical tent, where I was examined with no real diagnosis ('stomach cramp') and left to rest on the camp bed there. Later on, friends came to vist, including the girl. The next day I stayed in the medical tent and slept another night there - I had no desire at the moment to rejoin the hurly burly. But after that, it was hinted that it was time to get up, and so I did, rejoining my friends in our tent.
This was the year that the hormone levels were running high. Although girls weren't supposed to be in our tents, I remember one night when the boy on my left had a girl with him for some slap and tickle, as did the boy on my right (they didn't stay the night). A few days later we went on our five day hike; when my group came back, it must have been before the others as the camp site was fairly empty. So some of us - boys and girls - piled into one tent to sleep. Traditionally, we took down most of the tents on the penultimate day; we were told that we could sleep where we liked for the final night, so instead of sleeping in the marquee, my girl and I lay down outside the marquee. All we did was kiss (and at length; our lips seemed to be stuck together and I wondered how I would breathe) and I fondled her breasts. Nothing else. It never occurred to either her or me that maybe I too should be fondled.
We met up again a few weeks after the camp when I was touring southern Britain (again, the 1971 blog), but she broke up with me by mail a few weeks later. I commiserated with Sandy Denny's 'North Star Grassman'.
Internal links
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[2] 1480
[3] 737
[4] 95
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 491 | Dubrovnik log 7 | Holiday, Dubrovnik | |
| 727 | Circumetnea railway (Sicily log 2) | Holiday, Sicily, Italy | |
| 957 | Autoharp | Musical instruments | |
| 1400 | Neat hack - but is it useful? (Management program) | Programming, Delphi, SQL | |
| 1632 | Metabolical | Non-fiction books, Erythritol, Nutrition | |
| 1782 | Mitigating disasters | Personal, Computer |
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