As we talked about our past pets, I started to talk about the fish my brothers and I had as young boys. We had cats, a dog, rabbits and a budgie as kids, but we frequently used to have a rolling turnover of fish – primarily because the fish had a tendency to roll, turnover and float to the top of the tank.

I’d try and give my fish interesting names, like Cake or Finger, and my brothers would always name their fish Jaws, to the point of having five fish in a tank all named Jaws. It was at that point, as I told Dio, that I realised naming fish that are almost completely identical was a really useless idea.

Ok, if you have fish with markings or different colours, you can get away with it, but if you have no way of identifying the fish then it can’t really help. You may as well just blindly wave at the tank and say “Oh, the fish are called…” and ramble off some names whilst trying to avoid the question “Really, which is which?”. The only real answer to that is “Oh, just pick one. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t come when called anyway…”

But fish are weirder than that, fish are also anti-social and xenophobic. For example, any time that our old cat, Outdoors, tried to reach in to the tank and give them a high five, they’d just shun and turn away. Maybe they were shy, but I get the feeling they were purposefully blocking the attempt at friendship to try and remain loners.

But, there was another issue that I wanted answering, something that had bugged me even after all these years: why goldfish, who are aquatic animals, choose to spontaneously leap out of tanks on to carpetted floors?

Now, my prevailing, optimistic theories had been that it was some sort of Steve McQueen-esque break to freedom, trying to jump the rim and bellyflop to the toilet so that they can make a way home, or that they keep trying to force evolution upon themselves?

But, no, Dio came up with the same answer that inhabited my shadowier thoughts, and likely the thoughts of some readers out there: i think its suicide

This is where we come to the true realisation about goldfish and their place in fish society in general. You see, the fish are anti-social and prone to suicidal thoughts. Fish are so emo.

Fish probably have MySpace pages where they use the blog to angst and tell about how they got kicked out of the little castle by the diver and how they think they are going to end it all with comments such as “there would be no red tide in the water, I’m going to reach for the stars”, “That mermaid thinks she’s all that, won’t go near me because I’m not some cool jock like that guy on the swim team by the little plastic bridge…I’ll show her, I’ll show her I’m hardcore!” and poems of “My pebble floor cuts me/I taste pain in my soul/It’s over for me/So alone in my bowl”. Their blog entries with titles like “Do you ever feel like you spend your life just going around in circles?” and “The bowl tastes of my tears”.

As Dio suggested: how can a fish know its crying if it lives in water, that sorta thing. To that, I believe that Emo fish know, their answer would be like “I’m salt water, not by my genes, but by the tears I shed for my tortured soul”, these creatures would describe themselves, not as goldfish, but as “fish, the colour of a burnt sunset against a clouded sky”.

It’s also not true that fish have a short memory, they don’t, it’s just most emo fish decide it’s not worth remembering anything because life is always ebbing away and instead just sigh and say: “whatever” v.v

So, that’s the truth about fish, and also the truth about why I’m probably the last person you should be chatting with in Google while studying.

Yes, I am proud that I managed to avoid using the title “Finding Emo” and being sucked in to that gag.