The unexpected pleasure of gathering cowpats on the pastures of the High Andes

When I was a toddler in Newsham in Yorkshire we had friends at Hilltop Farm, and Mrs Todd used to send me to look for eggs in the boxes by the chicken run. The excitement and pleasure of lifting the lid and finding an egg — or two — in the straw is still sharp in my mind. Likewise the glee of spotting a mushroom in the woods when, later in life, I went on a mushroom hunt. The joy of finding half a crown half-buried in the sand on a beach in Cyprus, when I was six, is still fresh, and I’ve had an eye out for lost coins ever since. I’ve watched children panning for gold by the Amazon, seen pearl-fishers diving for the dreamed-of oyster which yields up a pearl, and tackled those children’s puzzles in which the outline of a designated object must be divined in the tangled lines of a picture — and know from all these things that there’s something quite primal and distinct about hunting for something, template in mind, and suddenly seeing it.