Upon driving into town this morning to help out at M’s sisters business (the sum total of which was drinking a cup of tea on the deck over looking the beach for a couple of hours and then leaving when it looked like being a slow day) my mobile phone got reception and five birthday messages popped through!! I am such a sucker that I felt like someone had declared today my birthday as well. I decided to run with this idea, as it was the most incredible weather and a public holiday up here in Queensland, which meant that everyone was out mowing their lawns/walking on the beach/kicking back on their verandahs. Lovely. We went for a wee drive, and then…

[brief explanatory tangent]

_________________________________________
While I was away I would occasionally call home, where M was hanging out with my Dad. I also had a message service that I could call and get voicemails that had been left for me. All the conversations that I had, and all the voicemails that I recieved, were less concerned with pining for me and more concerned about the revelatory nature of catching mudcrabs and drinking copious amounts of beer. I must explain further. There are mangroves at the bottom of our street. M has wanted, for ages, to put some crab pots down there to see if we could score ourselves some free seafood. Obviously he needed something more than my glazed expression whenever he brought up this idea. Two things happened in my absence:
1) someone gave him two, very well made, crab pots
2) my father came to stay
Apparently at one point, when there were two low tides per day, M and my Dad would tramp down through the mangroves and mud twice a day, to check the pots. They consumed so much mudcrab, that by the end of the week, they actually didn’t want to eat mudcrab anymore. Yesterday (on my birthday) I too battled through ankle deep mud to see if M had caught me a Birthday Mudcrab. We had caught a few HUGE mudcrabs, but they were female. You don’t eat female ones *sigh* so we let them go….
_________________________________________

…we went back down to the mangroves to check the crab pots. On the way we met a guy whose house looks out over where the pots are and introduced ourselves in an effort to let him know that we weren’t disposing of a dead body or anything else dodgy. He said that from now on we could go down his driveway to access the mangroves, to look out for snakes as they’d caught a taipan that morning, and lent us an oyster knife. The last point is the most important one. We found that we’d caught more female crabs and waved them a fond goodbye (they waved back, claws ahoy, as they backed away). Upon moving one of the pots to what seemed to be a more likely spot, I saw rocks encrusted with oysters. Oysters. Oysters feature in my Top Five Foods list. And there they were, free, fresh and calling my name. I opened and ate oysters with such unfettered joy that it took stabbing my thumb to distract me long enough for M to steer me back towards home. But not without grabbing two rocks that had at least a dozen oysters each clinging to them. We spent a lovely hour or two in the garden drinking gin (will it ever run out?) and hacking oysters from our rocks.