Fish and …………. - from 08/04/06

Fish and ………….


‘Go on mum, it would be really nice’ my daughter was saying once again to me ‘You have two weeks off so you will have time to do it’

This request was due to a tragedy which had happened about six months previously..........

It was a normal week day morning. My daughter was still in bed and I was shouting up the stairs every couple of minutes, ‘Come on Amy, you’re going to be late and if you’re late that means I’m going to be late’

I usually like to get down stairs before her so I can sit and drink my coffee in relative peace, but we were running a bit late this particular morning. I had been up late reading blogs. You know how one leads to another and before you know it bed time has come and gone, but you are still sat at your computer saying to yourself ‘Just one more then I will go up’.

I had walked through the sitting room into the kitchen, letting the dogs out on the way, and made my coffee. On the way back to the sofa, where I usually sit in the mornings, I happened to glance at the fish tank, which was next to my computer. Something was not right. The fish didn’t seem to be swimming. On closer inspection I could see that some of the fish were floating in mid water, while others were either floating on the top or resting at the bottom of the tank. They were all dead. I had turned off the light the night before just before going to bed and all was ok then but now they were all lifeless and decaying.

I stood for a couple of minutes thoughts going through my mind as to what could have happened during the night to cause all my fish, some of which had names and were like members of the family, to die so suddenly. I called my daughter once again and this time I added ‘the fish are all dead’. With this I heard her jump out of bed and run down the stairs.

‘Why?’ she said, staring at the fish tank. ‘What happened?’
I said I didn’t know and for her to hurry up and get ready for school, I had already been late for work twice that week and didn’t want to make it a third time. She went back up stairs and into the bath room and I sat down on the sofa to drink my coffee, all the time looking at the fish tank, wondering.

Now I had a dilemma. Do I try to get the dead fish out now and risk being late for work or do I leave them till I get home? I decided to lift the lid of the tank and have a look directly at the fish floating on the top. As soon as my nose was over the top of the tank I wished I had waited till after work.

The smell was like rotting carcases in an abattoir. It was the sort of smell that lingers in your nostrils for hours after. The fish looked flaky, like they would have if they had been cooked, I put my finger into the water, and it felt very hot and slimly. The heater had gone wrong and had been heating the water all night. The fish WERE cooked.
I decided to put the lid back on the tank and leave it till I got home from work. This was going to be a big job, not just a case of netting the fish and putting them down the toilet. On the contrary, I was going to have to completely empty the tank and disinfect it and all its contents.

Well that was six months ago and I have finally got around to setting it up again. Easy, you would think and so did I until I started it…….

End of Part One.

Watch out for Part Two coming to a screen near you very soon.