The Beginning of the End for Beach Bonkers

As I write this there is less than a year of Beach Bonkers to run. I’ve been offered the amazing opportunity to take early retirement in April 2024 and I’m seizing it with glee.

Everything I do now is tinged with the knowledge that this is the last time I’ll be doing something, or what will I do with the giant die? (Fear not, all natural treasures will be returned to the beach and all other resources will go to others who can use them, die included!)

Recently I took the beach to a primary school deep in the Suffolk countryside - as far from the beach as you can imagine. By the end I really felt we’d all been beachcombing. I’d say the mini beach is “just” a tarpaulin with three boxes of stones and shells tipped onto it but, the way the kids got stuck in, knowing it was full of treasures, made me so happy.

I think all you need to be a beachcomber is curiosity. It’s something we lose as adults but have in abundance as children. I love that even though some of the kids had found a fossil sharks’ teeth - which was the thing they were most eager to find - they also still wanted to know “why has this stone got lines on it, miss?” or “why is this so shiny, miss?”

This is the first of what I hope may be a year or more of short, sharp blogs. Random thoughts around beachcombing. Hopefully not too many rants.

Please do leave a comment (when I figure out how to set this up!) if something I say makes you want to respond. The polarised nature of our internet means I hesitate to ask a question, for fear my response seems black or white when I know everything is all the shades of grey in between. But please, ask away, be curious and let’s get discussing. Thank you.