S O S

S O S today is not a cry for help, it's a summary of an outstanding day.

Tony and I have just come back from two days on Anglesey, celebrating thirty-four years of putting up with each other without resorting to murder. We love the island for the coastline and the ancient Christian sites, and it's also one of the few places in the UK that still has red squirrels (though we'd never seen any there.)

Yesterday, after a delightfully quirky church service, we went on a wee boat around Puffin island. No puffins this time, but a few seals bobbed up or draped themselves over rocks for our entertainment. How anything can have that much body fat and still live defies all the rules of survival.

Then we fulfilled a little secret wish of mine. About two years ago one of the stones in my engagement ring dropped out, and its setting too, and we never found it, so I don't wear it any more. It looks like a mouth with a front tooth missing.

On Anglesey there is a Sea Zoo. On a place as beautiful as Anglesey you don't need Visitor Attractions unless it's teeming with rain, but I had my own reason for going there on a sunny day. By the way, it is the most brilliant sea life place I've ever been to (apart from the sea, of course), and I fell in love with a colony of tiny sea horses on the way round.

And at Anglesey Sea Zoo, they have a little tank of oysters. For £19.95, which I think is between thirty and forty dollars, you can choose any oyster and a member of staff will open it for you. They're all guaranteed to have a pearl inside.

I looked over the oysters and something inside me said 'that's the one'. The staff stopped what they were doing and gathered round to watch as a girl with plastic gloves and a sharp knife cut into the oyster for me, opened it out, and hunted inside it. At first I couldn't see a thing and thought it must be a very tiny one - then there it was. Everybody said 'ooh!'. It was a perfect sphere with a silvery pink gleam to it, about 3mm. Just the right size to have made into a ring, and the same shade as the pearls Tony brought me from Estonia some years ago. Oh, wow.

(It seems unworthy to mention that at a rule of thumb it's worth about three times what I paid. But I just thought I'd say, you know.)

Margaret means 'pearl'. And that's what I think I am - an irritating little grain of sand, but a grain of sand that has had infinite care and trouble taken over it.

Then we stopped at Plas Newydd for a walk in the gardens, and what should we see? Tony saw them first, when the branches rustled. Two little red squirrels chasing each other round a tree.

Seals. Oyster. Squirrels.

Surprise. Overwhelming. Sweet.