Be curiouser!

With my impending retirement I’ve been posting beachcombed items from my “tableful of treasures” on social media and talking about how the majority of it will be lobbed back into the sea.

I offered that if anyone working in education or doing similar to me needed a particular item for their collection I’d be happy to pass it on (except the mammoth tooth.) I’ve had lots of enquiries asking for the mammoth tooth (!) but also the entire collection.

Yet almost everything on the table is an “everyday,” “ordinary” find. What makes them extraordinary for me is the stories behind them. The pretty netted dog whelk shell that spends its day buried in the sand extending a feeding tube to scent carrion it can scavenge. The flint stone bearing the scar of a fracture, ironically shaped like a shell, with the posh name of “conchoidal fracture.” The c50 million year old mud with the holes made by burrowing piddocks.

Yes, there are more unusual items there too: the mammoth tooth, a fossil whale ear bone gifted to me, a flint stone with the impression of a sea urchin spine, but they are all there for any of us to find if we are curious enough.

I think GK Chesterton says it best: “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

Happy beachcombing!