Flotsam

As a boy, we once had a beach like this in front of our house. It was a big, elongate bungalow, its rooms running in a line parallel to the sands so all, except the kitchen which was at the back, had direct access across a veranda and a lawn to the beach.

I was twelve at the time, my brother two years younger, and our day started, just after sunrise, with us running out of our room, across the lawn with its high coconut palms, and out onto this.... our beach, a beach we as good as owned.

Some days, the best days, were spent entirely on the beach. The only company we had was a nondescript rough-haired dachshund called Suzie who used to race up and down the beach with the next-door neighbour's beautiful saluki, and our mother, who only worried about us if the tide was high and the waves a bit vicious.

One of our favourite occupations was walking along the overnight high-tide line, mostly formed of odd pieces of seaweed and remains from the coconut trees but which sometimes contained treasures such as these. The shell on the left is the violet sea shell Janthina janthina which floats across the ocean held up by a mass of bubbles which it secretes.  Janthina feeds on....

....other pelagic species such as the by-the-wind sailor and the Portuguese man-o'-war - this sailor was pictured at Sanna, on Ardnamurchan.

The second shell is the internal skeleton of a squid, Spirula spirula. While we often found this 'ram's horn', we never found a dead spirula squid because it lives in the depths of the ocean.

I didn't know any of these scientific facts at the time, though I wish now that I had. As far as I was concerned, these creatures were simply part of the wonders of Nature, and I loved them for that.