Scallop shell tattoo on a shoulder

The shell you sent from Padrón came in the same post as the Hartley's bill, so it spent a week on the mantel between the gas meter book and the clock. I've taken it down now. Mrs Okonedo next door says the ridges are the roads of the pilgrimage, all twenty-odd of them meeting at the hinge, and that every road leads to the same cathedral whichever village you start from. I told her you'd never once in your life taken a road that led where you were told.

The boys have been at the cockle beds at Leasowe every low tide since the weather turned. Dennis Pryce pulled up a crate on Tuesday and sold them at the back of the Fleece for fourpence a pint, which Father Cahill says is a sin in its own right. I kept back the best ones for the pan. The scallops that come up on the far side of the bar are bigger than anything we get here, the fishermen say, and they close so tight when you lift them that you'd swear there was nothing inside but sand.

I'll put the shell on the window ledge facing the road, so if you do walk home by the coast the light will catch the ridges. Bring me back the one with the chip in its lip, the one the old woman at the harbour kept for herself. Tell her I said she was right about the tide.

Yours, with the kettle on, Nan