Recently, I passed the old dock crane that stands on the port side of the Great South Wall, just a few metres from the red lighthouse at Poolbeg.
It was the first time in a long while that I stopped to take another look at this old artifact from a forgotten past and ended up wondering how long ago it was when this antiquated aul' contraption was state-of-the art?
Certainly neither today nor yesterday!
Yet, there it still stands, the ole crock on the dock, built to shift and heft cargo onto and from the ships that came and went from here way back in the blurry past of the 1800s, its role then pivotal in keeping the burghers of the town fed and watered, clothed and shooned, moneyed and up-to-speed - and/or the very opposite of this - as history would suggest.
But even so, it is now just an old yoke, a relic of forgotten times, its purpose purely nostalgic for people at best, a perch for a hungry gull or two its only real function.
The point? All things must pass.
As I looked at ye auld crane, I noticed there was a padlock attached to it. Though it had rusted away a lot, anyone could tell that it wasn't really that old, a handful of years ... tops! I reckoned someone might have put it there as a love charm maybe, a lot of young people lock padlocks to things for that reason these days.
But, if the besotted lover and his or her beloved saw their lock now, disintegrating to nothing in the salty air of the sea winds, they might do well to run a bit of an audit on the relationship it supposedly symbolises. Only joking!
No, as I looked at the little padlock rusting away to dust on the rusty ole crane, it gave me hope, especially in this period of lockdown, the one where we all think that things will never get better and never end!
My point? The shackles that are designed to contain and harness are, themselves, at the mercy of time and of tide and therefore can't hold things down for good.
Nothing lasts for ever, after all. Not even this pandemic. Which is a small comfort to know.
More soon ...
| The crock with the lock on the dock! |
