Before we left for Asia we had to consider what we were going to do with our goldfish. The only reason we have the goldfish anyway was to keep down the cloud of mosquitos hovering over the old lavoir beside our house. (here's my explanation to Kepler: the place where people washed their sheets with a bar of hard soap and sheer muscle power on a cold, dark and icey winter morning in the olden days. He couldn't quite imagine a world without washing machines and electricity.

Anyway we had seventeen fish (I've just noticed that we have eighteen!) which I would feed each morning. I came to enjoy watching them hurry over to me when they saw me approach. So what to do with them in the months that we would be away? Food was one concern but drying out was the bigger. The lavoir is a leaky tub and sometimes in the summer we have to top it up. So we thought about putting them in the swimming pool but then I could not imagine how we would retrieve them without scuba gear. In the end with the departure time looming we took the easy way out and decided to leave them where they were figuring that there probably wouldn't be a drought, leaving food as the only possible problem.

I fully imagined to coming back and finding them bloated and floating on the top. And they were - completely bloated that is, but fully functioning fish. Fat and healthy. All seventeen of them. So the day before yesterday I put on my boots, climbed into the murky pond water and caught all of them. It took a while because they tended to take refuge in the thick layer of rotten leaves at the bottom. But I got them. Then I lifted out all the leaves and put them on the compost and started baling out the water. It is incredible how much life there is in a pond. No wonder the fish were so fat and healthy, the water was full of worms and larvae and even newts. Kepler's sharp eyes spotted and saved three of those. There was even a tiny, baby fish that I couldn't catch but he's compost now.

It took most of the day but we cleaned it out and now all we have to do is find an environmentally safe product to seal it before creating a new habitat and putting all the fish back in.