The day was completely fish-related. The high winds had blown the water from the fountain and the level in the pond had dropped. My first jobs of the day were to treat the water, switch on the hosepipe and the UV clarifier that had been turned off while the pond was being medicated over the past week. I also had to check on Garfield… a brilliant, sparkly-orange and black baby koi, a fraction of the size of the others, who has hidden all winter beneath a plant in very shallow water. Being so small, he seems afraid that bigger fish might see him as breakfast and he has refused to come out from his hiding place. If the water levels had dropped too far, he would be in trouble.

I could see no sign of he little fish and was getting quite worried until I spotted him underneath yet another plant. He had, for the first time, voluntarily swum the length of the pond. I dropped a couple of pellets in his vicinity and was gratified to see him eating and swimming around. He was doing okay…

A little later, we went out to inspect the garden and feed the fish. The surface of the pond was empty, not a fish in sight, yet by the time we had taken the last few steps across the paving, forty of them were waiting to be fed, with several of them raising their faces out of the water, looking hopefully and confidently in our direction. They know the footsteps that herald food.

Not for the first time, I wonder about that. Small though I am in the eyes of the world, I am such a vast being in comparison to them. They cannot see me when they dart about their business in the water, only when they raise their eyes towards the heavens from whence all care comes; either in the form of fresh water and oxygen or as ‘manna’ falling from the skies. Sometimes our eyes meet and there is a sense of wordless understanding. A promise, perhaps, that I will always do what is best for them. I wonder if they realise.

I have, in the past, removed them from their pond to treat their maladies in medicated buckets… a stressful, frightening process for them, when they cannot know my aim is to help them heal. When water levels have brought near disaster, I and others of my kind have worked to put things right and ease their suffering. They have not seen as they gasped and struggled, only felt the fresh inflowing of clean water. Sometimes there is a muddied pool where all seems dark, dull and the visibility is poor. The fish cannot know that this is when the pump at the bottom of the garden is being cleaned for their benefit, yet they will play in the crystal waters that such murkiness precedes.

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