Dialogue: Pumped up and in a bit of a stink

By ROANNE PARKER

I'm 31, and today I became a grandmother. For her eighth birthday my daughter received new rollerblades, a pet rock, every variation of stationery set, one ice-skating birthday party that gets a whole column to itself and, after an early-morning shopping trip with her dad, one aquarium, one bag of brightly coloured gravel, some kind of pump thingy, a bag of weeds (that's weeds! Not weed, Nandor!), two catfish and four gold ones.

We regarded each other with trepidation, this little collection and myself, as I wondered what I was
supposed to do with each of the boxes and wet plastic bags on my breakfast bar. The fish goggled expectantly.

A brief background: we have been a pet-free zone for about a year, after a time in which I took to calling our home the Aqua-Hospice because it seemed to be where small, wet animals came to die.

We did the goldfish thing about eight times before I gave up (I was running out of matchbox coffins) and moved on to tadpoles. With the tadpoles I found the easiest thing was to forget about a formal interment and just chuck the corpses under the shrubs near the back door. The kids didn't even blink when another one went.

Ugh, the tadpoles were gross, now I think about it. They seemed to kind of melt and get slimier and
slimier until they stank like ... well ... stank like a rotten tadpole. If they were Dutch we would have
unplugged the life support.

Then it was back to goldfish for a last hurrah. We got to about six weeks with the last lot, something of
a house record I would say, when a friend's 2-year-old emptied the whole pot of fish flakes into the tank and we didn't notice until two days later. So the tank was cleaned, the gravel rebagged and I moved on to a wonderful phase of being nagged about 40 times a day about getting a puppy.

I am such a mean mum. I have said okay to a puppy so long as the kids can convince their dad that the
dog goes to his place when they do. I think I'm pretty safe with that one.

Anyway, I have the pump thingy suckered on to the right side of the tank - that's the inside, not the
outside - and I let the fish swim around in their bags to get used to the water and sloshed the anti-
chlorinated water stuff in, and placed the weeds artfully around the edges. They've been in there for
about six hours now and they are all alive still but a small problem has already emerged.

I tried to feed them but the flakes got into the whirlpool the pump is making and whipped around and
around and the fish aren't coming anywhere near the surface so how do they know there's food there?
Well, it seems they don't. Or else they're white-knuckled at the grade 5 rapids up top. Surely the pump
isn't supposed to make white water?

So now it seems they'll just starve to death and we will have a bunch of scaly Ally McBeals setting a bad example to teenagers.

How do you tell what sex a fish is anyway? Miss Just Turned Eight was crouching beside the tank calling out which ones had lumps and which ones did not, but I had a quick peek when she left the room and I couldn't see a thing. So any hints on fish husbandry would be gratefully accepted on behalf of my daughter and my new grandfish, especially regarding the tricky issue of the whirlpool on the top. I can't for the life of me see how they are ever going to be able to get hold of that fast food even if they do work out how to swim up to the top before they are too weak.

You can probably tell by now that I am rather unattached to fish in general. Cold-blooded towards
them, you could say. I know never is a long time, but at this stage I can't ever see myself an aquarist (got that one from the instructions for the pump). Still, for the kids' sake I do hope I don't kill this lot off too soon.

On the bright side, it's getting colder and this old place has loads of fireplaces, so I'm sure it won't be
long before I'll have a few more matchboxes. And, yes, I know fish don't have knuckles.