A suicidal fish and a dead mouse during dinner…



I haven’t posted in a while… not that I don’t have anything to say. I could write about why I think Mage: the Awakening sucks or the weird differences between American and English Reality TV shows (I might get back to that latter topic on another date), but instead I’m going to talk about a goldfish and some mice.

Well it’s more like this: Neighbours said they had found some mice in their house. Okay, so we didn’t think much of it, till we found one running across our kitchen worktop. Sophie managed to grab it with a towel (and also killed it with the force of her grab). We placed some mousetraps and over that weekend, they caught three mice!

Sophie got unusually freaked by this. They are field mice and we are living beside a field with cows, so it is to be expected. But she can’t sleep at night, thinking that there may be mice running around downstairs and so she buys really expensive super-sonic deterrent things. They seem to work.

Till about a week later. We’re all sitting at the table having dinner when there’s a nice ‘pop’ sound. No idea what it was, though the cooker had broken or some such thing. Then we hear the flailing. The mouse had been caught in one of the traps but wasn’t killed outright. I didn’t want to have to get rid of the mouse in front of Alice, our little toddler so we tried to ignore it. Sophie kept saying she can’t eat with that sound.

I found it hilarious. (Maybe it’s one of those, “have to be there moments…”)

And then there was the case of the suicidal fish. Sophie got this goldfish one day, bought a bowl, fish food, etc. We set it up in the living room and called it Petit Poisson (”little fish”). Then every evening we’d take Alice right up to the bowl to say good evening and the same in the morning. After a week Sophie dutifully changes the water and everything seems fine.

Now the bowl came with this red border thing. It’s like a large red ring and fits on top. Not sure what it’s for. It seemed to cup the top of the bowl like how ppl put barbed wire hanging inwards at the top of fences to stop ppl climbing over. Sophie put it underneath the bowl after changing water thinking it was really a stand for the bowl.

The next morning we go into the living room to find the bowl empty. Alice is pretty oblivious to this, she’s only 15 months old, but still she’s kinda giggling as we’re desperately trying to figure out where the fish is, poking the pebbles at the bottom of the bowl. That’s when we spy the little fish on the floor.

Don’t ask me how, but the goldfish has managed to jump out of its bowl! I thought it was just a joke in the movie Amelie about the suicidal fish. Poor thing. Scary though to think that we can drive a fish (with a five second memory) to suicide!