My friend found this mysterious item on the beach, I gravitated to it last Friday. It was cold and windy, the sky was organising itself for a serious Nil Visibility Deluge. Intrigued and careless of warnings about the smell, I took it home, leaving it out in the rain. Next day at sea..... as they say...

It had been my intention to draw this, a kind of get-to-know-you, getting-to-feel-at-home-about-you thing. It was all that I could do to take these photographs, and then dash inside to scan this. While what I think is two species of sponge, cungevoi and a sea-tulip, with barnacles welded in, was quickly sent back outside, the pong of it, the unrelenting olid stench, with its air of rotted prawn and festered crab, its whiffy overtures of putrescine, its glued-in on-the-bugle high notes, were not so easily dismissed. I got a shovel and dug deep into the vacant vege garden bed, buried it deep and packed in the earth on top, with a blessing and an apology to the poor innocent herbs in the next bed.

Then I scrubbed  the gloves  I was wearing and then my hands. The scent lingered as they say in romance novels.  Took a shower, washed my hair. Put on clean clothes. The smell kept coming back to me. Maybe it was a stray molecule or  perhaps it was not a real smell, but the memory of the foetid odour that had etched itself on an incredulous neural loop that kept replaying like a scene from a car accident that killed the family dog when you were seven. The thing itself is still morbidly fascinating, and sometime soon, when my brain has stopped revivifying its dead-dog stink, I am going to draw it.