As a child, I was obsessed with my DK Eyewitness Ocean book, particularly the “dangerous creatures” pages. My favourite was the Portuguese man-of-war, illustrated by a silhouette of a man being dwarfed by a jellyfish-like creature with 30-metre tentacles.
They seemed a world away, exotic in both location and possibility. So when they began beaching in greater numbers on Cornish shores around 2010, it initially felt exciting. But they weren’t the beasts of my fantasies; they were smaller, lifeless, carried here on the Gulf Stream and discarded by the waves like oceanic jetsam.
