Things were not going well for our hero. Getting Bob home went okay with minimal bumps, but he appeared to have a scale missing once we got him in the tank – we can only assume that it got knocked at the shop during transfer from net to plastic bag. However, this wasn’t the big problem. The big problem was that the little fella refused to eat.

We followed instructions to the letter with the tank. Kept the lights off for the first 24hrs of our new guest and didn’t feed him until the following day. We opened the pack of special floating fish pellets that came with the tank under the guidance that this was the best possible food for our new pet and carefully measured out three meagre pellets into the bowl – aware that goldfish were renowned for not knowing when they were full and overeating until they made themselves ill and their tank rather manky in the process. Only, he didn’t exactly rush to eat them. Roundly ignored them, in fact.

We went out for the day (to see Chicken Little, no less) and on our return the pellets had vanished – hurrah, he’d found them and eaten them. Job done. Then the next day the pellets got ignored again – only this time they weren’t found later in the day and he spent most of the day, hiding away at the back of the tank behind the octopus. This didn’t bode well. Where was the “eat anything that’s vaguely digestable” goldfish I was promised in the manual, eh?

As anyone sane in the technological age (okay, that’s just me then… and you say it should read “insane”? Ooookay) does, my first stop was google. There was bound to be someone out there who could tell me if my fish was sick or whether this was normal fish pouty behaviour in a new tank, wasn’t there? Oooooh boy… wasn’t there just. I found a fish forum and posted a query – mentioning that damaged scale but commenting that as far as I could tell it had started to heal. Their cure for new fish lethargy and food refusal? Apparently, I should be testing the water daily, I should be getting hi-tech water testing lab equipment, I should be housing my 1 tiny goldfish in a tank half the size of the living room, it was obviously at death’s door and I only had myself to blame for being a BAD FISH OWNER!

And I thought fish were supposed to be restful!

I got myself into a bit of a state, as Zip and Nada will attest. How crap was I? Couldn’t keep a £3 fish alive in a £100 aquarium?! On Sunday, I popped into the pet store to pick up some Stress Zyme (for the fish, it’s the one that’s stressed… honest) and chatted to the fish guy there. You know what it was? Go on … guess.

The fish preferred flake.

Practically hoovered up the stuff this morning and is now frisky and perky and exploring its tank. I am NEVER going to read fish keeping forums again.