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Eating mussels at ten thirty in the morning and really enjoying them. It's possible. There are humans here doing just that. They extract the tiny morsels from their black shells with serious expressions, as if their lives depended on it. Precarious pyramids of empty shells gradually form on their table.

At another table two large people, almost as wide as they are tall, are eating unusually small pastries, one each, carefully, with big fingers and drinking coffee. They are determined to drain every last drop of their cappuccinos by putting their heads right back and turning the paper cup upside down at the entrance of their open mouths and then waiting patiently for gravity do its work.

A more ineffective defence against being eaten than a big hard shell is difficult to imagine when what you're dealing with is a hungry human. Every fish, even a large one, just keeps swimming when it sees you closing your shell, no matter how tasty the snack they know (or don’t know) to be inside. But if you're unlucky enough to be swept up in a dragnet (or perhaps you had the misfortune of being born a farmed mussel and you never knew the pleasures of the wide open seas or the joy of being caught in a wave and rolling with it, all the way into shore, before being washed back out again) once a human has you in their tentacles there is no escape, shell or no. You’ll wind up in a big pot with some of your friends and a bunch of others you don’t know.

And when you slightly open your shell to sneak a peak, thinking you're back in the water and it might be safe, the water tastes terrible and soon it’s starting to get pretty damned hot and you close your shell again as tight as possible, but to no avail.

And then it’s all over. Forget about it. That was your life. Your shell opens up by all by itself as the water begins to boil and soon your body (I imagine it succulent and tender yet slightly resistant to a set of well maintained molars but I'll never know) is being prised from the inside of the shell to which you were clinging for dear life, with a toothpick.

Melbourne, 2015.