I Wish I Had....

There are so many things which, looking back over a life, one might wish to have done, perhaps, even, things which, if there had been only a tiny change in the winds of fate, might have happened. One of the things I wish I had done is to have been an expert on something, perhaps, even, THE world expert. I wouldn't have been interested in being The World Expert on anything man-made, so it would have had to be something from Nature, something unusual, something beautiful. In my case, a good example would have been to have become The World Expert on....

....cowries. I have always loved these shells, from ones like this, which I remember picking up from the reef off Mombasa over sixty years ago, to....

....these ones, which I collected on a relatively recent holiday in Tanzania, each of which is around 15mm long, to....

....these Atlantic cowries, found on an Ardnamurchan beach, which don't measure 5mm in length.

Had I stayed in East Africa I might have become The Cowrie Expert, though I very much doubt it as Kit Metcalfe, the Mombasa European Primary School headteacher, was already way ahead of me.

Today, wandering the countryside of East Sutherland, I see plenty of opportunities for me to develop an expertise, for there are so many wonderful things which I, as a confirmed Non-Expert, stumble upon each day. One that immediately springs to mind is the fungi. Even with my abysmal knowledge of these wonders of Nature, I have managed to find tens of species, of which I have managed to identify a paltry few. I doubt whether there's anyone who could cope with total expertise on the 12,000+ species to which Great Britain is home, nor with some of the complexities of their identification,  so concentrating on a clearly-defined area would be a sensible ambition. However, I couldn't do it, not now, even if I really, really wanted to. One of the things a World Expert has to have is a good memory. I've never had a particularly good one but age is busy eroding what little I once had.