It was like a scene from CSI or Bones or – if you follow me – like Cluedo. The scene was the Conservatory, there were four dead bodies in a lavishly-appointed and, as the estate agents say, a highly desirable residence, there was no visible cause of death, no signs of violence, only these poor mortal remains. Only one remained alive and he, one would think, would be the obvious suspect. However…
Hang on. Before anyone wonders why this Tale of Horror hasn’t been all over the newspapers, perhaps I should mention the four bodies in question were guppies, jolly little tropical fish who had, for reasons which were unclear, made the Great Change.
The cats were guiltless. It’s not that they hadn’t been interested, you understand, but the glass lid baffled them. It wasn’t, as The Other Half, postulated, extreme heat, caused by my wanton buying of a heater and whacking it up to full temperature. No, the thermometer showed the temperature to be just fine. So what the dickens was it?
As I said last week, I’d slipped into Guppiedom by accident, as it were. Now I went looking on the internet and found my preparations of a heated tank, a filter, plants and a bottle of Tapsafe to de-chlorinate the water were all very well, but not enough. What had seen off the finny denizens was the chemical imbalance of the water. Under the reproachful eye of the last remaining guppie, a little orange chap called Carrot, I hastened to correct my mistake.
I lovingly tended the water in the tank with an aquarium start-up kit. It’s pleasantly scientific to faff around with vials and pipettes and take water samples and add other chemicals to see how its all doing. It takes about twenty days or so, and all the time, Carrot, the great survivor, hung on in there.
The Book (the leaflet that came with the start-up kit) said to add Zebra Danios and Harlequins, hardy little tykes that can take a bit of chemical imbalance and help the process along. So in went three stripy Zebras, Spot (natch) Crossing and Serengeti, with the two Harlequins, Easter and Evans. (Named after the Harlequin Rugby players by Lucy.) And Carrot, despite the fact he should have been dead, continued to flourish. Mind you, the Zebras confused Carrot. He wanted to swim along, to shoal out with his mates, but Zebras don’t swim like guppies. He tried, bless him, but went off sulking in the waterweed. The poor thing obviously was having an identity crisis.
Came the great day. The water in the test vials was clear; the tank was now chemically balanced and – thank goodness – I wouldn’t have to subject Poor Carrot to a course of Freudian analysis but could simply Add More Guppies.
I picked Jenny up from college that evening. After chit-chat about the day, I said brightly, “I’ve bought five guppies.”
She looked at me in stark horror. “Mum,” she said, in a sort of death-rattle whisper, “How could you? Whatever will Dad say? He’ll go mental!”
“Your Dad’s fine,” I said, puzzled.
“You’ve told him!!!”
“Yeah, I spoke to him earlier on the phone.” She continued to look worried to death. “There isn’t a problem. He doesn’t mind.”
She continued, as they say in old-fashioned fiction, to search my face, then understanding dawned. “Hang on. You didn’t say puppies, did you?”
Hope all the fish are still OK. But you may need that marine psychologist for one of your zebras - calling him Spot will surely give him a complex! And how do you tell the zebras apart? If you address one of the others as Spot by mistake, he'll get a complex too!
ReplyDeleteLife is just so full of problems, isn't it? Even, I suspect, if you're a little zebra fish.
ReplyDelete