A fish called Wilson!

You know how it is! There I was, feeding the leather in both the Morgan and the Volvo, and my thoughts settled on another feeding operation that I had completed a couple of weeks ago.

My wife and I were once again at our youngest daughter's home in Warwick, doing a spot of baby-sitting, that not only involves attending to our two lovely grandchildren, but also includes giving due attention to their goldfish, or should I say solitary fish. For that is the situation at present, a veritable shoal of fish, well three or four actually, has been reduced to one.

In the beginning, when they bought their fish globe some two or three years ago, there were four colourful fish happily enjoying their somewhat mundane existence, swimming round and round, waiting for the odd charitable flake of food to drift their way. Amongst this motley collection was a fish called Wilson!

Wilson

Perhaps a couple of weeks later the group had been reduced by one, who had deemed to shuffle off this mortal coil and this was followed, with astonishing regularity by the remainder, except one,.... Wilson!

He was clearly surviving very nicely thank you, so the family, who were concerned that he was lonely, went to the shop and bought another three fish. All went well for a few weeks, until they too started dropping like flies, or rather floating upside down to the surface, with the exception of one,.... Wilson!

Not wishing to deplete further the existing national stocks of goldfish, by introducing any more to what amounted to certain death, Wilson remained alone for a number of months, happily enjoying his monastic existence.

However, as the family wished to add a bit more colour and interest to their aquarium, they decided to buy more fish, this time from a different supplier to avoid possible further disease. But as there were now distinct murmurings amongst  family members, suggesting that perhaps Wilson, a somewhat miserable and now possibly depraved specimen, had played no small part in the demise of his fellows, it was decided that he should be placed in solitary confinement in a large jam jar on the kitchen window-sill, a move that was tantamount to him being placed in a death cell!

For many months the new arrivals swam happily around the aquarium while Wilson swam around his jar, being fed half-heartedly, in the hope I think that perhaps the family would sit down one morning for breakfast  to find young Wilson, accused without trial, to be no longer alive! However, on one of our visits, and to my  immense delight, because I was growing to feel a lot of affection for this little fish that resembled a small whitebait that had broken its back, Wilson seemed to be, although a bit rough around the edges, extremely healthy.

Came the day, when it was suggested that as all the new fish had survived splendidly and Wilson had had a dose of whatever you give to fish with an inherent disease, he should be re-introduced into the aquarium.

No doubt Wilson gave a sigh of relief when this decision was reached, but it is very questionable what the reaction of his new friends was, to the arrival of this rather drab, reclusive little individual into their idyllic lives, but any suspicions that they may have had were manifestly upheld some days later, with the untimely death of one of their number, to be followed by the others sometime later.

Now, months after that cataclysmic event, there is just one small fish remaining in the tank, a little fish called Wilson, a born survivor or perhaps a merciless serial killer!!!

THIS IS THE SORT OF POST THAT IS WRITTEN WHEN A MORGAN DRIVER IS DEPRIVED BY THE BRITISH WEATHER FROM ENJOYING HIS CAR!!