I’m having to modify my views on the existence of fossils on Brighton beach. True, the place is not littered with them the way you might find in other parts of the country, and what you come across is often smashed almost beyond recognition, but I’m seeing more and more of them. Apart from the Fairy Loaf I discovered a few days ago (11th Nov) other stones of the day (e.g. 26th & 29th Oct, 15th & 16th Nov) have shown telltale signs of something that couldn’t just have happened as a result of a purely geological process. After all, the Weald, not so very far away, has a reputation for turning up some remarkable pieces and the chalk cliffs all the way through the Seven Sisters are made up from the remains of countless billions of ancient shellfish.

Today’s stone of the day is a bivalve of some kind (actually you’ll have to take my word for it as it doesn’t photograph well but, seen in 3 dimensions you can much more readily discern that one end is spatulate while the other shows evidence of the suture joining the two valves; in short, it’s mussel-shaped). While its overall form suggests that it was fossilised whole, in its current condition, because of the relentless grinding caused by the tides over innumerable years, only about 50% of the shell survives, and yet these few fragments, because they are so battered, evoke as much their journey over time, as the creatures original appearance, and what is no longer there is suggested by what remains.

Giorgio de Chirico once noted that a vase only has meaning once it has been broken. There is a tradition in Vietnam of repairing ceramics with elaborate inlays of gold wire, to emphasise rather than conceal the fracture lines. We should all gild our wrinkles, but it’s easier said than done.