So we started with photographs from the contemporary art district 50 Mongashan Road.  I wanted black and white photos of particular views of China that meant something personal to me.  So we bought a few.  Once we got them home there was the problem of how to put them up.  We do not know what the lease details of the apartment are, so we didn’t want to damage the walls.  With no Blu Tack in sight anywhere, no picture hooks and no picture rail, Richard came up with the ingenious idea of double-sided tape…… which worked for a few weeks, but as the moisture in the atmosphere finally reached the mounts they all tumbled off the walls, so we are back to the drawing board with those.

Next came the idea of having some plants around the place.  Richard came home from work one day with a handful of plants from the office – cuttings of plants that can grow without soil, just living in a vase of water all the time.  The water has to be changed weekly, but there is probably enough nutrients in the poor quality water of Shanghai to keep them going hydroponically without any additional feed from us.  Then Richard bought some orchids, a mass of bright magenta ones, and a group of white ones with pink centres and a group of pink-veined yellow ones, which the florist at the Hongqiao Flower Market said would last the longest, which they have done by a mile.  The other two types have more or less dropped all their flowers now and I expect Richard will be going back soon to get some more.  We are surprised how much they do drop all their flowers – we kept some white orchids in flower for at least 18 months whilst living in Fordwich, from the moment we moved in as a moving in present to myself to when we left for China.  But we seem to have little success here.  I wonder if it is the variety of Dendrobium that we are buying.

To the art and the flora I wanted to add some fauna.  A toy dog or a cat is impractical up on the 17th floor and unfair, I think, for any animal to join our pack and then be left behind when we finally return to the UK.  And I don’t have the Chinese desire for keeping a song bird in a cage. But we have goldfish in our pond at Fordwich and I had goldfish as pets when I was young.  I’ve always enjoyed watching them swim around and I diligently feed them every day from the spring to the end of the autumn. We have seen fish for sale in the flower market whenever we have gone along.  So goldfish would be our animal of choice.

First of all we had to find a fish bowl that we actually liked.  Not long before we knew we were coming to China I had seen an old Chinese porcelain fish bowl I liked on eBay, which although in need of some drastic repair I still liked it,  so I bought it and it is currently at West Dean College being repaired by one of the ceramics students.  Traditionally the large tall bowls have goldfish painted on the inside and are highly decorated on the outside.  Often mistaken for planters in the west, ours was a typical Qing Dynasty bowl .  Although there were fish bowls available in the local flower markets here neither of us really liked any of them – their designs and colouring were unsubtle.

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However we did come across a ceramics shop as we were walking around the French Concession one day just before Christmas which sold modern understated designs that both of us liked and they had a modern, shallow, large circumference fish bowl and a matching tea jar with a jade stone handle that we ended up purchasing then and there.  Once we got them home we took a trip the flower market the next day and bought ourselves three fancy gold fish with long flowing tails, together with some fish food and some plants to help oxygenate the water.  The fish bowl was duly filled with water, the goldfish in their plastic bag floated in the bowl as the two volumes of water equilibriated and the weed added so that when they were ready the fish could swim around and enjoy their new home.  We loved watching them swimming around  and coming up to take their food every day, after they got used to me and to the time of day that I fed them, they lost their inhibitions and came to the surface with relish.

When we bought them they had been crowded together with dozens of other goldfish in a polystyrene box with air pumped into the water, and although our three fish seemed to relish the extra space afforded to them in their new home, it became obvious that having been brought up in water that was pumped with air, their were not acclimatised to life in a bowl where there was none.

So on a walk one day, when we found another (better) flower market with more (better) fish stalls we bought a pump  to bubble air into their water.  But one of the fish was doomed.  We soon noticed that the most beautiful of the three had fungus growing on its body, which spread eventually to its gills and Richard found it floating dead one morning.  The other two fish had been doing their best to keep it afloat and the fungus transferred itself onto them. I wondered how I was going to treat them – there is a vet over the road from the apartment but the language barrier, and the potential cost of saving two gold fish put me off going.  They were only gold fish after all.

This, you may think, is the saga of which I headlined this piece, but you would be wrong.  After a search on the internet Richard discovered that adding some salt to their water would kill off the fungus, and after 10 days of so it did.  Where the white fungus had been growing, on their dorsal fins, there was evident tissue death, but apart from that they were fine.  They enjoyed swimming around their bowl, the smaller one of the two chasing the larger one and being quite a nuisance to point where I was thinking that it was a male interested in the bigger female.

And when we turned the pump on after a while they would become skittish and tear around the bowl at high speed, evidently enjoying the kick the oxygen-saturated water gave them.  Enjoying it so much, that one day one of them jumped clean out of the bowl and ended up on the coffee table on which their bowl stood.  I was reading close by so I just scooped it up and put it back in the bowl.  It seemed none the worse for wear.  But I did warn Richard that it wasn’t a good idea to leave the pump on whilst we were out of the apartment.

A few weeks later I was busy writing a blog post and got up from the spare bedroom desk where I write and went to get myself a coffee.  Richard was in the shower.  The pump was on.  A goldfish was on the floor…….

It had been there quite a while.  It looked dead.  Its gills were definitely not working.  Should I put it in the bin or just see if I could revive it by putting it in the water?  I put it in the water.  Nothing happened for a couple of minutes and then its gills twitched a little bit….maybe, just maybe……I stood watching it for ages….. And then it started to open its mouth a little, and little by little the gills and mouth worked some more and it got itself going again I had saved it!

But where was the other one?  Richard had been in the process of cleaning them out.  The bowl was only half full of water – the bucket we use to carry and equalise the temperature of their water was on the other side of the apartment ready to go in their bowl.  Perhaps the other one was in there.  But it wasn’t.  It definitely wasn’t in the gold fish bowl. Had we got two kamikaze gold fish?  Perhaps it had gone under coffee table?

It wasn’t. It was under the sofa.  The underfloor heating was on and it had stuck to the floor.  I know that, as it was very difficult to scoop it up.  I put it back in the bowl, on top of the weed.  Well the other one had survived, at least I should give this one a chance too.  Nothing happened.  It lay there for several minutes. Then slowly, slowly, it started to move its gills. But it looked very poorly.  Much more poorly than the other one.  Was I going to have a brain-damaged fish on my hands?  What would a brain-damaged fish look like?  (Does a fish actually have a brain or is it all in the spinal chord?) I had no idea how long it had been out of water.  And if it did survive, what did that say about any fish I’ve bought fresh from a market……..

It survived.  Not before it had floated head down in the water though,  and then upside down.

They are now both alive. And swimming the right way up.  Whenever we put the pump on and leave them unattended a pair of my tights has been sacrificed as a fish bowl cover.  We have moved them out onto the balcony which is cooler and so the water should absorb more oxygen and they should need less pumped air.

But they don’t like me.  They continually hide under their weed and don’t come up to get their food until they think I have gone.  I catch frilly views of them through the weed or a surreptitious glance from afar as they make a dash for their food.  Forget the nonsense that goldfish only have a 5 second memory.  These two have been remembering for WEEKS.

And I saved their lives……….

And to add insult to injury they are both turning pink  Looks as if the pet shop were feeding them something to dye them gold, a bit like the pink shrimp that make flamingoes pink. Our fish are no longer bold or gold.