Animal Calamity! The Goldfish of Doom

The Goldfish of Doom

If you ask experts they'll tell you that goldfish grow to be the perfect size for whatever tank they live in. So if you put them in a small bowl, they'll stay small. That's a lie. It just isn't true. My mum's goldfish Jeremiah started off in a small bowl, but very soon he was too big for it. So he went into a medium sized tank. Then he outgrew that as well. And he just kept growing, until we had to put him in a huge tank. The only fishbowls I've seen that are bigger were in the aquarium at London Zoo.

By the time this story takes place, Jeremiah was a very big fish. I'm not going to exaggerate, but I want you to know exactly how big Jeremiah was, so get a ruler. Got one? Right - his body was 14 centimetres long. I measured him. But that wasn't all. He had a long, floopy tail. That was harder to measure, but I managed to do it roughly, and the tail was about 17 centimetres long. That means that altogether, Jeremiah was 31 centimetres long. I don't know about you, but that's bigger than my ruler. That's a big fish. He was the size of a small dog. A small, bright orange, dog.

So here's the story of how I accidentally killed my mum's goldfish and destroyed Earth. Nearly. OK, I lied about destroying Earth, but once you've heard the goldfish-y bit you'll never look at goldfish the same way again.

There were only a few days left of the school holiday and guess what I was doing. Splashing in a tropical pool? Zooming down another ride at a theme park? No. I was at Homebase. I was testing sofas with my friend Arly. If you think that sounds like an odd way to spend an afternoon then you don't know Arly.

Arly is a bit of a genius. At least, I hope he is because if he isn't he's just weird. So I'm counting on the fact that one day he'll turn out to be a genius. In the meantime, he's my oldest friend and although I have absolutely no idea what's going on inside his head most of the time, I can't imagine not having him around.

Arly is always there when you need him. A lot of the time he's there when you don't need him too, but it's been ages since that felt like a nuisance. Despite his slight oddness, he's great. Honestly. No, really. If you rang him up and told him you'd been captured by aliens and they were trying to cook you in a giant hat, he wouldn't just believe you straight away, he'd have a plan within 30 seconds. That plan would probably end in disaster, but it might also turn out to be fun and at least it would be a plan.

So anyway, there we were, testing sofas. Actually, testing sofas is one of the best ways to entertain yourself in Homebase once you've duelled with the giant tubes of foam insulation and been told (twice) to stay away from the power drills. It's always a good idea to keep Arly away from the power drills.

My mum and my baby brother were somewhere in the building-supplies department - possibly lost - looking for that stuff that sticks bricks together and one of those triangle things for, well, sticking bricks together. We had a brick problem at home. The house wasn't falling down, or anything, it's just that there was meant to be a low wall in the garden between the patio and the lawn. It had been there for years. But that morning somebody had basically destroyed it. (When I say 'somebody'... it was Arly. Generally, unless I say otherwise, assume everything was Arly.)

He'd done it accidentally while we were finding moss to build a Moss Man. I was scraping with a mug. Arly was hacking with a spade. Turns out he had very poor spade control. The old wall was mainly held together by the moss, so after not much hacking it crumbled into a pile of loose bricks.

Which brought us to Homebase.

"This one's the longest so far," Arly shouted.

All I could see were his trainers sticking up in the air about five sofas further up the line. I was lying down and stretching out - a very reliable way of measuring sofas, but only their length. To measure softness and toughness, it's important to do what Arly did next. He rolled backwards over his head, over the arm of the sofa he was lying on, straight onto another sofa, where he elegantly splatted on his face. I sat up to watch.