Pet seminary

The Boy's fish has moved house and location. His name is Jimmy, though to preserve this blog's tradition of anonymity I should maybe refer to him as the Fish.

The Fish (or Jimmy) used to live in a rectangular tank in the Boy's room; now he has moved into a bowl in the living room, giving him (I calculate, having googled how to work out the volume of a sphere) an extra 800 cubic cm.

I have a sneaking suspicion that bringing him more into the family area is a cunning means of making him our responsibility. Which may not be wise. The pets of Ben to date have been:

• Some goldfish when I was about five. Forget what happened to them, or how many there were.
• Owly. Guinea pig, inherited from neighbours when they moved. Foully murdered one day by neighbour-across-the-road's champion ratter, who couldn't understand what the fuss was about. Owly was buried with full honours and a verse of the National Anthem.
  
• Huffles, Susie, Blackie and Ginger. Guinea pigs. Huffles and Susie were purchased with blood money donated by champion ratter's owner. Huffles (mine) was a light brown abyssinian with fur in tufts; Susie (my sister's) was smooth haired with patches of brown and black and white. Huffles turned out to be not rodento intacto when she came from the shop (or we'd have required a discount) and before long turned out the other two whose names were bestowed on them for not entirely impenetrable reasons. The four of them were eventually sold on before we moved to Bangladesh in 1977. Because I never saw them go I still have the occasional fantasy that they may be alive ...
• Peter, née Genevieve. Guinea pig, very elderly but not so elderly he couldn't have his way with Ginger before pegging it. The ambiguity over his name is because he was acquired from an elderly friend of my grandmother who gave him his birth name. Honestly! Even I, aged 10, could tell at one look that Genevieve was not really applicable so a hasty renaming was in order. Was told he had died in his sleep. In fact my father had gone in to feed the animals one morning and found maggots crawling in Peter's flesh, so zotted him on the head. My father forgot he had never actually told me this, hence the slightly traumatising conversation many years later that began "Do you remember that guinea pig of yours that I killed?"
• UPDATE: Apparently it wasn't an elderly friend of my grandmother, it was her doctor (military), making the failure to recognise the fundamental Peter/Genevieve dichotomy even more baffling.
  
• Piglet. Guinea pig. Lovechild of Peter and Ginger. Always sickly, didn't last long.
• Tass. Dog. Domesticated Bangladeshi pye dog, to be precise; brown/ginger, short haired, with pointy ears and curly tail typical of the breed (though the ears flopped down at the top; he probably had a bit of European ancestry). Acquired from fellow ex-pats moving back to Blighty. Got his name because as a puppy he escaped from the Soviet Embassy (YES REALLY) which might explain his constant breaks for freedom whenever the gate was opened, to fight everything on four feet within a half mile radius. He never really twigged that he now had the diplomatic and military protection of the free West. On second thoughts, if he wasn't fighting with it then he was mating with it, so maybe he did. You could follow his progress around the suburbs by the sound of furious barking. Sadly, his loose ways proved his downfall and he died of a dose of canine clap one summer while we were in England.
• Bruno. Cat. Acquired with our house in 1984 (strangely from the same original owners of Owly's murderer, 11 years earlier; the army throws up coincidences like that), died of respectable old age in 1998 after a further two house moves. Or rather: euthenased with dignity in the vet's surgery, though I gather a close relative had to be talked out of taking cat and rifle on the long walk to the end of the garden.
  

So there you have it. A sad tale of premature death or being sold; only Bruno had everything mostly his own way but what would you expect of the species? Jimmy should watch out.