Daisy and the Trouble with Life (3 page)

I didn't want to give Freddy away. I wanted to keep him and teach him to talk, but the trouble was, he kept jumping out of his bowl.

The
trouble with jumping out of your bowl
when you're a goldfish is you end up on the carpet.

The
trouble with carpets
is they're nowhere near wet enough places for goldfish to live.

Flip knows why Freddy kept jumping out. Mum said it was because I kept feeding him live ants. She reckoned Freddy must have got live ants in his pants and all that wriggling must have made him want to keep jumping out of his bowl.

Trouble is, goldfish don't wear pants.

I think Freddy kept jumping out of his bowl because he thought he was a dolphin. When he was living in the sea before he came to our house, he must have met some dolphins who showed him how to do dolphin tricks.

If I was a goldfish, I'd much rather be a dolphin because dolphins are by far the best fish around. Dolphins know how to stand on their tails without sinking, and they can balance balls on their nose and even jump through hoops. Without ever landing on a carpet.

Freddies can't. That's the
trouble with goldfish who'd rather be dolphins
. They can't do tricks without falling out of their bowl.

Even if you've got quite a big bowl with weed and gravel in and everything.

The
trouble with weed and gravel and everything
is you have to keep it clean. Otherwise the water in your goldfish bowl goes green.

We came back from holiday once and you could hardly see Freddy. Mum said his water looked like pea soup, which is the worst kind of soup in the world.

Mum said the suitcases would have to wait, and before we'd even unpacked she put Freddy in a saucepan of clean water and then wiped all the green stuff off his bowl with a cloth.

I wanted to have a bath with Freddy because it would be much more fun for him than a saucepan, but Mum wouldn't let me. Which isn't fair because I was really dirty after our holiday and really really needed a bath with Freddy.

If you have baths with goldfish, you can make hoops with your fingers for them to jump through and teach them tricks that even dolphins don't know!

But Mum said NO. Under NO circumstances am I allowed any alive fish in the bath with me at any time. Not Freddy. Not any goldfish. Not even a very small tadpole. Oo-er . . . Sorry – I just need to go somewhere again! . . .

The
trouble with tadpoles
is mine never hatched.

The ones at school did. They were in a big jar on the window ledge in Mrs Donovan's class and they hatched all right. And grew legs. And ate bacon.

Mine didn't. The ones in my bucket just stayed like dots. Mum says I shouldn't have put the ham and live ants in until they'd hatched. But I thought if they saw the ham and live ants, they would get hungry and then they would want to hatch quicker. But the ham went mouldy and the ants crawled out. Then the water went smelly. And the dots just stayed like dots. That's the
trouble with frogspawn dots
. Sometimes they don't know what they're meant to do when you put them in a bucket.

The
trouble with buckets
is the more you fill them, the heavier they get.

When buckets are really heavy, you can hardly carry them at all. Heavy buckets do things they're not meant to do. Which isn't your fault. One day I was helping my mum clean the car and I filled our big red bucket with soapy water. Actually I put the water in first with a hose and then I put some bubble bath in afterwards.

Mum didn't know I was using bubble bath. She thought I was using normal car bath. But I thought the suds would be better if I used bubble bath. And they were. But the
trouble with suds
is they get really sudsy and grow and grow until all you can see is suds, and you can't see how much water is in the bucket.