Family Pets...

There seems to be a general assumption that a family pet must have 4 legs and a great deal of fur. That’s not true. People keep lizards, snakes and tarantulas, even if you can’t take any of those for a walk. Or even bury your face in their fur. Well, you’d just squash the tarantula, wouldn’t you. As for the reptiles; you’d just exfoliate your skin, and not in a good way.

I find that people look askance at me when I say yes, I have 2 pets; they’re goldfish. They live in a garden pond. I frequently sit in the garden and talk to them. They don’t answer, but then neither does God when I talk to Him. Well not directly. Neither do the fish.

The generic name of my pets is “The Goldies”. I christened them Porgy and Bess. They‘re Olympic Gold Medallists in synchronized swimming, up and down they go, always in unison. So devoted are they to each other, that when they rest, they cross their tails. How lovely it is to sit and watch them holding hands, or rather holding fins.

Of course I don’t know whether they’re boy and girl, girl x 2 or boy x 2. So far there have been no baby Goldies, but then the last 6 summers have been very cool.

I hope they’re not bored in the pond, but then again as they allegedly only have a 30 second attention span, probably every minute they’re finding something new to look at, or even falling in love all over again.

One day I thought I’d lost them; I glanced out the kitchen window as I was cooking dinner and was horrified to see a huge heron standing on the hedge gazing down at the pond. I chased him away, but the pond seemed empty. I thought he’d gotten them and I was broken hearted. Three days later they surfaced. They must have been terrified to stay down so long.  Some instinct unrelated to their attention span had kept them safe.

Of course, yes, it would be nice to be able to bring them places, but unless I can get hold of miniature aqualungs and strap then to a skateboard it’s not really practical. So unlike dog lovers who regularly end up chatting to strangers in the street, you don’t really get a social element with the Goldies. You never end up saying”I met someone interesting walking the fish today”. Although; the other evening, as I waited for my Chinese takeaway, I chatted to the goldfish in the tank on the restaurant counter. With that, the Chinese man behind the counter whipped out his Smartphone and showed me videos of his own fish swimming in a large aquarium in his home. I have no idea what type of fish they were, as I don’t speak Mandarin. Of course I was very complimentary – well if someone showed you photos of their children, you’d wouldn’t say “That’s a very quare looking child”, now would you.  Needless to say, I felt obliged to whip out my antique Nokia and show him a photo of a black plastic garden pond with two small yellow blurs in it. The picture doesn’t do them justice; they’re 6 inches from nose to tailfin and built like Czechoslovakian body builders. And not from steroids I might add.

As I say, people look askance when you say your beloved pets are piscine. Sometimes you don’t need something that will curl up on your bed or bark at strangers. Sometimes you just need restful companions who will hear your secrets in silence.