For One, Brief Shining Moment

"Don't let it be forgot,

That once there was a spot,

For one brief, shining moment,

That was known as ...."

Camelot - a place that once must have been real, and is now firmly a myth. A dream of the once-upon-a-time future.

It was and will be a place of wonders: A Summer and Winter, Spring and Autumn Paradise - where the original "Beautiful Young" dwell - if not in harmony with each other, at least in touch with something deep within their individual natures: The real fight against ignorance and prejudice - the ignorance of worn out systems only present through inertia, and prejudice grown from poverty and lack of exposure to the opportunites so freely available, and so frequently abused, elsewhere.

Lic Shakespeare, Timisoara, Romania, 1993-96.

That was Camelot. A brief moment of time and located in a land besotted with myth.

Magic happened then, the magic brought by unrecognised freedom, in a system which had lost control and hadn't had time to regroup and rebind.

Ideals drove some people on - not just the young people, the older ones too, determined to make the world different.

Money drove on others - dollar signs in their eyes, but free at last to pursue that greatest of democratic treasures, private property and wealth.

Yet others were there for the ride, not knowing what they had entered, not particularly caring either - but the magic penetrated even their indifferent skins.

Like all magical moments, it was brief, intangible, incomprehensible and never to be repeated (until another time, another place).

In June, this year, a number of the survivors met. There were empty chairs around the round table.

Whether married and starting young families, swept away in the Romanian intellectual diaspora, well on the way to their first (US $) million or just making it good at home, a remarkable group of young people came together. A number of the elders were there too.

There was still magic there - but not the high energy, atmospheric fission - magic that had sedimented somewhere inside the people (I'll avoid using 'soul' - although the Romanian word conveys a sense of essence not really present in the English, it also sounds too much like souffle for my heathen taste).

No matter where these people go, what these people do, there was in their lives, that brief, shinning moment -

and to Arthur's bussom, they shall eventually return.