We're at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica and I guess because they're beach side, there's all kinds of flotsam and jetsam collectables around the place. One such thing was a lovely wooden box filled with sand with perfect scallop shells dotted inside. David Attenborough or Nigel as I sometimes call him is an avid collector of anything found on a foreign beach. And if you are familiar with New Zealand customs, you will know that getting any kind of mollusc through is harder than muling a bag of cocaine, the only thing to rival them is a banana - the smell of which, has the beagles going quite literally bananas. One time coming back from Bali, he hid a whole cache of coral in the hotel laundry bag and then covered them with his Coast boxers and Country Road socks. As he blithely swept through in Auckland, he suddenly felt the greasy finger of a rubber gloved customs official at his scruff and in a few seconds he and all his smalls were revealed to a flight of Japanese coming in on an A380 from Tokyo. After a lot of shrugging which was meant to convey that the hotel must have left it all in there, he was released with only a couple of pebbles and a small conch to show for his troubles. Luckily I had anticipated this so I mingled in with the Japanese and pretended I didn't know him. As you can see his light fingered pilfering has enriched him with 3 new acquisitions so let's see how he and the beagles get on with this lot.
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