Pondlife alchemy

Properly hot, and weekend, and shoes off, and a ukulele Christmas DVD put to bed. Time to peel off the ivy from the shed, and empty its contents onto the lawn to put it back again in the right order.

And at 37˚, the pond starts to bubble over. Fish slithers over fish, chasing their own eggs into the shallows, gobbling madly. I jogged down to the pet shop on Amhurst Road and bought a little plastic tank with a pink lid, and back to the garden just in time to comb out the last of the teeny pearls of life into a tupperware jug and then decant.

Overnight the air pump buzzed quietly in the kitchen, a little clump of weeds tossing around in the swirling pond water. By tea time, a single shard of glass, a tiny splinter of life, hanging onto the inside of the tank.