Fish, by Kevin

Keeping fish is a brilliant hobby. Some people think that it is not brilliant, but they are wrong. On the contrary, keeping fish is brilliant. It is brilliant because you can do it indoors or outdoors and all year round without getting wet, except for your hands, and also your shoes if you slip on the rockery and accidentally step into the pond. Also the bottom of your trousers will get wet, so it’s probably best not to wear any trousers when you are tending to your pond. Unless it is wintertime, when it is really cold, in which case I recommend that you invest in a pair of specialist insulated waterproof trousers. You can get them in any fish shop. Just ask.

It is possible also from time to time that all your clothes will get wet, but this is not a direct result of keeping fish. It is a direct result of having a pond and Michael Williams as your next-door neighbour. If you have a pond and a next-door neighbour who hates you and calls you specky mongo and enjoys pushing you into your pond when you’re squatting down beside it while tending to your fish, then the best thing you can do is to fill in your pond with concrete and buy an indoor aquarium. That way, your neighbour will not be able to either enjoy or kill your fish or push you in the pond. He will only be able to grind your face into the concrete and pull you through the stingers and dog poo round the park.

There are many different kinds of fish you can keep, whether you have a pond or aquarium. There are big fish, small fish, medium-sized fish, flatfish, roundfish, dogfish, catfish (but no mousefish; that would be silly), stingrays, eels, zebrafish, angelfish, devilfish, piranhas, marlin, tarpon, bream, cuthbert, dibble, and chubb. My favourite fish of all kinds is one called Hypostomus plecostomus, also known as the suckermouth catfish, but my fish-collecting friends and I always refer to it as Hypostomus plecostomus because then it sounds like we know more than everybody else and also that fish-collecting is very scientific and technical, which it is. The name itself just rolls off the tongue and is very nice to say. Try saying it to yourself mentally now: Hy-pos-tomus Ple-cos-tomus. It rhymes! See. Say it again. Now say it out loud. Now say it to the next person you meet on the street, in the shops, or in the barbers. Don’t say it in an aquatics shop, though, unless you’re willing to fork out £250 and have everyone else in the shop go “That isn’t how you say it” and you will look stupid.

Hypostomus plecostomus is also a very useful fish because he eats all the algae off the side of your pond, which helps to keep your pond clean. He does not eat other fish, either, which makes him one of the more decent species among what is, let's be frank, a rather unsavoury bunch. A great many different species of fish simply do not get on, and you have to be careful not to put them in the same tank with one another, otherwise you will come down in the morning and find the tank smashed, blood everywhere, half your fish half-eaten and the other half suffocated on the carpet or else escaped out the window. Also, do not have a cat. Or worse, two cats who can use a hammer between them.

Another advantage to keeping fish is that it is a matter of the individual collector’s taste how much he comes into contact with other collectors, or indeed other human beings. If you are the sort of person who feels more comfortable in the company of exotic fish than people, especially ladies, then keeping fish could be the hobby for you. There is the additional advantage that there are not many lady fish collectors, so when you do have to meet other collectors, they are invariably male, which means that when they make fun of you or humiliate you for your pronunciation of Latin words or ignorance of the reproductive cycle of the guppy or when you refer by accident to sea monkeys as space monkeys, there will be no ladies present to witness your humiliation, so you will not have to cross them off your list of possible sex partners.

Novice fish collectors should be aware that fish collecting can be a highly competitive, dog-eat-dog hobby, and that most of the other people engaged in it, like people in general, are not very nice at all, so it is probably best to order your fish by post, not leave the house at all, and have your mom answer the door when the postman delivers the mail. That way, the only person you have contact with is your mom, and you don’t even have to let her into your room, so nobody will see your fish but you.

Fortunately, I have devised a novel way of collecting fish that gets around having to visit the aquatics shop and its snooty habitués. There is another obvious source of fish in your locality that doesn’t involve getting wet or spending extortionate amounts of money and which will also provide you with a hot meal, which means you can cut out your mother as the middle man in the process: Yes, the local chipper. I have discovered that if you ask them nicely, they will give you fresh cod, haddock, halibut, ray, roe, plaice, rock salmon, and Mars bar, and in some chippers you can even tell them if you prefer your fish in breadcrumbs or batter. These fish are rarely found in aquatics shops, making them all the more exotic, and although they do not move much around the aquarium, choosing either to sink, float, or slowly disintegrate according to species and coating, they don’t require feeding and are very low-maintenance, which means you hardly ever have to visit the aquatics shop any more to be ripped off by those know-it-all bastards with their nitrogen cycles and specialist insulated waterproof trousers that don't work.

A word of advice, though: Do not mix fish from the chipper with fish from the aquatics shop. It tends to make all of them very nervous.

There. I hope that you will start keeping fish as a hobby now that I have shown you how brilliant it is. Write to me and tell me what fish you have at home, and we can make a list.

And that is the end.


(Kevin MacPherson is Derek W. Dick Professor of Ichthyoanthropology in the Patrick Duffy School of Fish at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Margate.)