A View Of Improvement

Those friendships we enjoyed so casually in a life not overburdened with demands, allowed us room to celebrate with ease, a freedom we now find embalmed in photographs. There I am, grinning with a new caught fish, the harbour as it once was, when fishing was the only industry, and tourists, rare beings indeed, wandered past and viewed us as if we were actors caught up in some ongoing play.

Now, these same tourists are the staple of the town, the fleet which was its heartbeat, replaced with pleasure craft, and those huts where skilled men sat and mended nets, become cafe’s laid out to catch your eye, and tease a coin or two for absent-minded snacks.

Time and change have no sentiment, allowing man to alter, as he sees fit, the rituals and ways which, in the past, were thought to be the bed-rock of our world. In old men sitting by the harbour, I see a commentary on change, a certain melancholy not entirely wrought by age, and wonder as I watch them, how much we understand about our world, as we lay their rituals thoughtlessly to rest, obsessed as we are by the desire for what we call improvements!

With growing urgency we seek the new, and dream of a life free of germs or dirt, but these men who ploughed the oceans for their food knew, when home, that Eden was underfoot, long before we, who followed them, trampled their sacred ground while searching for a place called Camelot.

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