Seagulls

The seagulls have lived here for as long as they can remember. In that collective memory in their little bird brains that goes back many many bird generations. They keep coming back to this cliff to roost. It’s their home and they don’t realise, or care for that matter, that we don’t call it a cliff anymore. They don’t pay attention to us much, only when we drop a stray chip.

Those chips have got more plentiful as the sea has got further away from their home, on what they still think of as their cliff. The food from us has replaced most of the food they used to find in the harbour. We’ve built their new cliffs and changed the name, but the walls of these buildings serve the same purpose for the seagulls regardless of what’s going on inside.

They carry on ignoring us, and for the most part we ignore them right back. But every now and then someone will walk along the street below, and they’ll get a slight whiff of salt air. Pausing for a moment they look around and take in the sky and the weather and think about how close they are to the harbour. Maybe they know that they’re standing where the foreshore used to lie. And very occasionally they might look up and see the gulls and be reminded that while we change some things, others aren’t up to us.