Happiness is a perfectly formed poo.

Those of you lucky enough to be in regular communication with me, will no doubt have heard that I managed to misplace my beloved mobile the other day. OK, so "misplaced" maaaay be stretching the truth ever-so-slightly given that I maaaay have been drunk at the time of it being misplaced *ahem*

Anyway, among with the minor inconveniences of losing my mobile; having my ties cut to the outside world ..my entire life having to go on hold ..being forced to make use of conventional forms of communication (shouting really loudly, telepathy, clinging on to peoples' legs so they can't get away incase I need them again, and *gasps* speaking in p-e-r-s-o-n) ..not to mention losing the hundreds of contacts, both work and social, I have built up over the past few years.. Most annoying of all is that I have lost my phone's photo album.

You see, for some reason, I seem completely incapable of taking a digital camera out of my rucksack to take pictures with, despite there being one in there at pretty much any time (in my defence, its case does have a rather complicated fastener to contend with ...what with it being made of velcro n'all *coughs*). So I have always relied on my trusty mobile, which has a fabby 2 mega-pixel camera, and is always safely, snuggly tucked away in my pocket at all times (except when misplaced. Obviously).

I had diligently been building up an extensive collection of photos of pine marten poo over the past few months. Rather than this being yet another perversion of mine, I was actually trying to document the assortment of guises marten poos can take, dependent on their diet, for my methodology write-up. Most books will show you a black twisted scat as being typical of a marten. However, marten diets are plastic, reflecting their opportunistic and generalist feeding patterns, and so a large proportion of scats are far from "text book" in appearance. I wanted to provide pictoral evidence of the variety of shapes, colours and textures to demonstrate how caution should be taken when identifying scats based on their morphology alone. I had quite a comprehensive collection built up, and then I go and lose my bleedin' phone. Grr. So here I am, starting the collection again, everyone's gotta have a hobby and all that...



You have to wonder though, if my phone was found by someone else, why they wouldn't just take pity on the owner and return it to me - the handset itself was covered in scuffs and scratches, including a rather large crack right down the front of the fascia, but more than anything: wouldn't you wonder about the mental state of someone who's phone was filled full of photos of poo??