Beachcombing

The haul from our visit to Tom’s farm in Tutukaka the other weekend. A paua (abalone) shell, a couple of super iridescent swirly shells, and a fragment of something… but what?

I’ve always thought of myself as a words guy much more than a numbers guy. So it didn’t take long to come up with “BLEND” and “WHISKY.” And that would have been the end of it, until Google. I typed in “blend whisky jug” and scrolled through the image results for just a few seconds. Amazing. There it was on the first page.

Drumroll please… the Royal Blend Whisky by A G Thomson of Glasgow was apparently a favourite of King Edward VII. They made a lot of jugs like this one more or less 100 years ago. Somehow part of this one ended up on a tiny beach in Northern NZ. You can buy an intact example for a couple hundred bucks on Ebay and elsewhere. So my little shard isn’t exactly the wreck of the Atocha, but it was still a good treasure hunt!