Colchester has long been a town associated with fear and horror. Many of these were introduced by the Romans, like the pigbeasts that live in the historic sewage system underneath the town, where they devour whatever rotting filth that seeps down to their lair. And it was here, with the tyranny of Boudicca, that that most universal of fears – woman – achieved its apotheosis.
One of the most recent horrors in the town is the university. Built in the 1960s, it is an endless series of concrete squares and brick towers thrust into the side of a desolate hill. Utilising what were at the time state-of-the-art techniques of psychological depredation, this holocaust of architecture has been breaking the spirit of revolution and free-thought in potentional student insurrectionists for generations. It is here that the greatest terror of the present-day lurks.
Amidst the brutalist facade and the modern student class, their mobile phones and foreign voices ringing out across the void as I walk amongst them, are the rabbits. An infestation that neither guns nor myxomatosis have ever managed to tame, the rabbits leak across the campus from the surrounding fields. Like with the crabs of Christmas Island, absurd sights abound. Football matches are played around them, rabbits crowding the six yard box. People sit and eat their lunch, feeding not pigeons with their crumbs but the Leporidaean hordes. And their corpses line the carpark, the spaces outlined in blood instead of paint.
“Everything about them is just wearying,” says one anonymous student. “Whenever my mother comes down to see me she points at each and every one and says ‘Look, David, a rabbit!” But once you’ve seen a million rabbits every day for three years you’ve probably seen them all.” There is something about his body language which suggests complete defeat.
There is the theory of the Mobius, too. It has been suggested that each pair of rabbits give birth to their own grandparents, creating an infinitely repeating closed loop of continuity, safe from the tarnishing aspects of evolution and the theorised decay of entropy. Professor Theobald Vaaak shows me the workings of his theory, but they are far too technical for me to understand. He helps explain it using the analogy of the surface of a balloon, trickles of paint flowing down from the top like blood, forming clotted stalactites that hang delicately from its underside. This explanation proved too oblique for me to follow, and the professor’s shouted denunciations followed me back to my car.
As I drove across the county to my next destination I tried to reflect upon my experiences of the day, but meaning proved elusive.
Jeff Randall is Essex Terror’s Senior Correspondent. All complaints shall be referred directly to the IPCC.
