In Search 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, and  some remaining artefacts. Me grinning with a new caught fish, the harbour as it once was, when fishing was the only industry, and tourists, rare beings indeed, who wandered past, and viewed us as if we were actors in a play

Now, these same tourists are the staple of the town and the fleet which was its heartbeat is replaced with pleasure craft:  those huts where skilled men sat and mended nets, became 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 a character.  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, as we lay their rituals gradually to rest, obsessed as we are by the desire to improve.

With growing urgency we seek the new, and dream of a life free of germs and doubt, but these men who ploughed the oceans for their food knew back at home Eden was underfoot, long before we, who followed them, trampled over their Paradise in search for some new Camelot

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