It sits on my desk as I write, a memento from our Norfolk visit, where I found it at the tide’s edge. This blue-and-ochre shell comprises 30 or more fine layers of wavy calcium, rising to a swollen weathered apex. You could imagine the original bivalve sitting in your palm as an intact and living whole. But for that thought experiment to be true, I’d have to be more than 100 years old. Because this European flat oyster is a relic of a lost Victorian ecosystem.
The colony that gave rise to my shell had probably existed here for thousands of years, until the dredgers got to work, as they have on 90% of wild oyster reefs worldwide, and smashed it apart, then took the lot. Native oysters are functionally extinct here, as they are around most British coastlines.
