Aquar­i­ums

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Louise, a friend of mine from Brighton recently set up a creat­ive writ­ing website. The idea is that every­one is given a monthly writ­ing prompt, with all the submit­ted work posted the follow­ing month for comment. I decided to have a try follow­ing the first prompt- the theme was Aqua­mar­ine. I couldn’t really think of any idea for a story, so I just wrote what came to mind. What they call a five finger excer­cise. I think I’ll ramble less on the next one. Here is what I wrote . .

I used to go to the aquar­i­um when I was stressed or angry or just plain bored. I had acquired a year’s pass in slightly strange circum­stances. At the time I worked at a language school. The owner had taught for a measly three months and then decided to open his own school (language schools are almost entirely unreg­u­lated). He had also done some kind of bull­shit online coun­selling course, and felt himself to be some kind of life-coach­ing guru. When confron­ted with anything prac­tic­al he would beam at you, spout some trite self-help book maxim, and try to disap­pear as swiftly into his office as possible.

His academ­ic input was limited to trying to persuade every­one to include 15 minute sessions in their classes for shar­ing feel­ings. He was later to disap­pear with all the money. The so-called academ­ic manager limited herself to admin­is­trat­ing registers and moving students into inap­pro­pri­ate classes. If you asked her any ques­tions about teach­ing she’d say “I don’t know” very slowly and look at you as blankly as possible until you went away and stopped asking her anything. One day she asked me if I wanted to go to an educa­tion­al talk at the aquar­i­um after work. I said yes, because it was a free trip. When I got there it turned out to be a sales talk for managers of language schools to send their students on trips to the aquar­i­um at discount rates. It was a little awkward, me being there but not being the manager, and I tried to avoid answer­ing too many ques­tions in case they asked me to leave, but every­one got given a free year-long tick­et at the end, so it was worth the slight discom­fort.

Before that, I had been quite into aquar­i­um-keep­ing myself. I had two tanks, one large cold one with fancy gold­fish in, and a smal­ler trop­ic­al one with a lovely blue betta splendens in (who ate the most disgust­ing look­ing dried blood­worms). I was dili­gent about test­ing and chan­ging the water, keep­ing the temper­at­ures right, and dosing the fish up with salt and methyl­ene blue when they looked peaky. There is some­thing very satis­fy­ing about keep­ing an aquar­i­um well. You are creat­ing a whole mini ecosys­tem. Gold­fish in partic­u­lar create a lot of waste, and you need to strike the correct balance to cultiv­ate the plants and the bacteria in the gravel which deal with the pois­on­ous ammo­nia and nitrites the fish produce, but also while not encour­aging algae to grow. Filters and water changes can only do so much. You don’t provide the very air for other pets, fish are totally depend­ent on you creat­ing the right envir­on­ment for their surviv­al. Maybe all people who keep aquar­i­ums are secretly mega­lo­ma­ni­acs in some small way.

One of the gold­fish, Roger, was also a little hyper­act­ive, and had a tend­ency to get pieces of gravel stuck in his mouth and then zoom around the tank hitting his head against the glass in a panicked attempt to get it out. You had to fish him out, wrap him up in a wet jay cloth and squeeze him gently until the gravel popped out. If you wrap fish in a wet cloth they don’t real­ise they are out of water and don’t flap or panic. I don’t know if that confirms the popu­lar stereo­types about the intel­li­gence of gold­fish or not. If you take them out of the water in this way, you have a minute or two before they suffoc­ate. Keep­ing gold­fish obvi­ously requires nerves of steel. Luck­ily the gravel always came out very easily, and Roger lived to tell the tale.

Despite all these gravel-related emer­gen­cies, he survived all his tank-mates, and lived to a grand age of 6. By the time I got the aquar­i­um tick­et though, Roger and the others had all been dead for six months. I had kept the tank for a little while, but my heart wasn’t in repla­cing them. I kept the gravel wet, and gave it away while it was still good cultiv­ated gravel full of help­ful bacteria. I’m not sure there is any other hobby where plastic bags of wet slimy gravel are a prized gift. I miss having an aquar­i­um, but in the last few years I have moved too often. Aquar­i­ums don’t like being emptied and moved, it disrupts the envir­on­ment in them too much.

Even before that, when I was a kid, I was very into collect­ing frog spawn from ponds, and letting it hatch in a jar and releas­ing the result­ing tadpoles back into the pond. Some­times you got lucky and found newt spawn instead, which was even better. Newt spawn comes in indi­vidu­al eggs on plants, rather than in clumps. The tadpoles were even more excit­ing than the frog ones, being larger and with fluffy extern­al gills. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to be a spy, an archae­olo­gist, an explorer or a biolo­gist in the future, but I hoped it would be possible to combine all of those, and also to keep on collect­ing frog spawn. Like some sort of cross between Gerald Durrell and Indi­ana Jones, and prefer­ably commu­nic­at­ing using secret codes.

Unfor­tu­nately as an adult, I was not explor­ing uncharted territ­or­ies, collect­ing zoolo­gic­al speci­mens or uncov­er­ing govern­ment secrets; I was teach­ing at a badly run language school. I had good students, and there was satis­fac­tion in creat­ing classes, but the atmo­sphere behind the scenes was fairly toxic. After a bad day it was a relief to go around the calm, sooth­ing aquar­i­um.

This partic­u­lar aquar­i­um is appar­ently the oldest extant one in the world. There is a long Victori­an gallery with vari­ous tanks with things like lion fish and eels and displays about how to grow coral in, and a shal­low pool in the centre with manta rays. When I was a kid they used to allow you to pet the rays, but this isn’t allowed any more because it was stress­ful for the fish (fish are covered with a protect­ive layer of mucus which is rubbed off by touch and leads to skin prob­lems if removed), but they still allow you to feed them. In the next room is a big pool with seat­ing and a tunnel through the centre. In the past this was a dolphin­ari­um, with dolphins cooped up in an unsuit­able tank and taught to perform tricks. After a long-running campaign though, the dolphins were removed in 1990, and now there are smal­ler, more suit­able creatures such as dogfish in there, and also two large turtles who are unsuit­able for release back into the wild, and who are fed with lettuces on fish­ing rods.

My two favour­ite things however were the Amazon rain­forest display, and the ceph­alo­pods. There was a maze construc­ted from mirrors and plants, with back­lit tanks set in with vari­ous amazo­ni­an creatures such as piran­has and pois­on arrow frogs. Piran­has look like they are made of bronze coloured sequins when they’re lit up. One of my favour­ite things about the branch of Foyle’s book­shop on Char­ing Cross Road is that they have a large tank of piran­has in the children’s section, for no appar­ent reas­on other than why not. We also had an Amazon Trail computer game at school. I wasn’t much good at it, my people always died as horribly as in the Oregon edition, just of ingest­ing some­thing pois­on­ous rather than dysen­tery. I don’t know if I would be much good in the actu­al Amazon, I’m not great with high humid­ity. I’m sure 7 year old me would be very disap­poin­ted. Of course imagin­ing being an explorer is much more comfort­able than the real­ity.

The octopuses and the squid (yes, octopuses, it’s not latin, and there is no way in hell I’m ever going to say octo­podes or octo­po­dia) had their own little section, where they lived in tanks filled with amphor­ae. The large octopus liked to play with lego. I could stand and watch it for ages. There was also a cuttle­fish which would obli­gingly change colour, and large tank filled with clouds of jelly­fish. About 12 years ago, Yo La Tengo created an instru­ment­al soundtrack for some nature docu­ment­ar­ies of the sea, which was performed live at show­ings of the film and also recor­ded as the Sounds of the Sounds of Science. There is one track called How Some Jelly­fish Are Born that is incred­ibly hypnot­ic, and one of my favour­ite pieces of music. (I also recently went to see them doing some­thing simil­ar for a film about Buck­min­ster Fuller, and it is one of the best things I’ve ever been to)

The Natur­al History Museum in London has a giant squid preserved in a tank of form­al­de­hyde, but it’s out the back because they don’t have enough floor space to display it, so you have to ask to see it at recep­tion. One thing I would also love to see would be a deep sea aquar­i­um, with a dark tank with pres­sur­ised water, and all the biolu­min­es­cent fish found at deep levels (which are very hard to bring to the surface alive, because they tend to die of the bends or exploded swim blad­ders). Appar­ently this doesn’t exist at the moment though, but Monterey Aquar­i­um in the US is work­ing on it. I’ll have to stick to watch­ing the deep ocean on tv until they invent it.

I took my then boyfriend to the aquar­i­um a few times. He lived about 2 hours away. We didn’t see much of each other by that point for vari­ous reas­ons, but it seemed a shame to split up. He was utterly enchanted by the turtles. If it was possible I think he would have slipped one into his bag to take home. I have a lovely picture of him grin­ning at some terra­pins like they’re his first­born. If he wasn’t visit­ing though, I gener­ally preferred to go alone. I think I regarded it as my place, and company would have been weird. I stopped work­ing at the stress­ful language school after a certain point, and went back to univer­sity for a change of direc­tion. My tick­et expired at about the point I moved away. I haven’t been back since. I prob­ably should.

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