WHEN I read in The Post of developments/improv

ement schemes and such, I think of Bude in the 40's and 50's, and how it has changed, not always for the better. The Canal and Wharf, for example, can anyone really remember it as it has been fashioned now?

A E Housman's lines spring to mind: Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

From, A Shropshire Lad XL.

Or, perhaps, my own much inferior lines: "The canal's a cowed stream

No brigs or ketches ply

To the car-parked slip...

where commerce dreamed

Itself to a chic café;"

from, 'At The Old Wharf's Archive.'

And to Joe (Munday) your young correspondent; I do believe you have been reading Oscar Wilde, you bad boy! I feel a quote coming on! "There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

Do please carry on, you'll make a Daily Mail journalist yet!

Royal Tunbridge Wells.