It’s like an addiction. We can’t keep our hands off them. Every year we try to control ourselves a little better. For example, don’t collect more than you eat yourself is one of the rules that we impose on ourselves before we go into the Wadden Sea barefoot and armed with buckets, and that no one sticks to. With our heads down, we trudge through creeks and over sandbanks, sometimes sinking ankle-deep in the mud, stepping on sharp edges of shells, shouting, “There’s another really nice one,” and “Wow, that’s big,” and “That’s now but really the last one.”And then it becomes an orgy again.

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