SHELLS

I do like collecting shells, albeit in a small way.

After all, there are seldom any rare Conch shells likely to turn up in the places I tend to end up heading on holiday and, to be frank, I'm hardly Ursula Andress, but the occasional nicely coloured cockle shell has been known to catch my eye and end up in the back of the car for a while before being placed on a shelf to gather dust, or inside a shoebox, or perhaps on my desk as a small reminder of happier days.

That is probably why his large pile of shells stacked up in a corner of a mud flat recently caught my eye. Not because I wanted to pick them up, but because I was suddenly reminded of quite how so many of them get left on the beaches so that I can pick up a few of them from time to time.

I realised that they were only there, of course, because of the large amount of wading birds that were using that particular mud flat, and that these shells represented a whole lot of lunch with each one having been picked clean by some bird or other as the tide receded.

Nature raw in tooth and claw and, of course, beak.

Each and every one represents a little tragedy for a marine bivalve mollusc and a little victory for a wading bird in nature's great game of life, and, given enough time, the empty shells will be ground down or stepped on to make more of the material of the beach itself, or picked up and carried away to end up on the sea floor or glued onto jewellery boxes and other touristy nick-nacks.

Sometimes just one colourful shell will attract my attention and I'll carry it around for a while, even though the colour which I first noticed will fade as it dries, only to be brought back to vibrancy by the magical addition of a little water. On other times, just the sheer volume of them will make me want to fill my viewfinder and take a snapshot which might - but probably won't - serve as a desktop pattern for a while.

Maybe I like shells because I spend so much time in a shell of my own making?

Or perhaps it's just because they're all rather pretty...?

Or maybe they just remind me of happier days...

It's so hard to tell any more.