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Goldfish

Small, attractive fish which are known for their ability to survive the indignity of being kept in small fishbowls, fed intermittently, and given no particular interest in life apart from the humans carrying on their lives on the other side of the glass. However, these small fish are often underestimated, and this may be one of the reasons why a well-known personal loans company Goldfish.com has been named after the fish. Or it could be that goldfish are pretty things and look nice on the credit cards and Goldfish credit card advertisements.

Goldfish have the irony of being very memorable, (again another clue for the choice of good marketing at the bank), yet are themselves reputed to have very short memories, in a kind of an opposite reputation to that of the elephant! Seven seconds is one supposed estimate of the memory of a goldfish, but I seriously doubt this and invite people to try to experiment into this. (It's not as daft as it sounds. I have already proved by experiment that mosquito larvae have memory of well in excess of half an hour, and they are a much smaller life-form than goldfish!). Meanwhile, see (image, right), the Goldfish Bath Mat by Paramount Zone. Also, if you are keeping goldfish in a fish tank, you might be interested in the very quiet fishtank

However, now we get onto the poetic symbolic philosophical part of the write-up, because goldfish have a curious hidden talent which is an allegory to the human condition and teaches us something revealing about reality! Most people think of goldfish as being just small fish that live in goldfish bowls, and they never do anything and never grow much or change or develop. However, if you move a goldfish from a small fishbowl to a bigger environment such a large pond, the fish will GROW! Yes, it's true, goldfish grow if they have more space to move, but don't grow if kept in a small fishbowl! Make that a warm water pond, and the goldfish will grow quite surprisingly big! I've seen ordinary small goldfish that were won at the fairground grow THIS BIG <performs hand gesture for effect> just because they were kept in a large pond. Also, I've heard that at Alexandra Palace in the early days of radio, the huge transmitter valves were water-cooled, and the water recirculated through the huge fishpond. As a result, the fish living in the warm water grew to be enormous! Of course what's really going on is that the fish are naturally big, but stay small if kept in a restricted environment. This is starting to sound familiar, a bit like NORMALITY, which is the artificial situation which humans are made to live in in "normal" life. People live their lives with no hope of expanding into a more generous environment, and their ambition remains restricted, and they never grow. However, if people's horizons were expanded, their minds would grow to new levels of consciousness and enlightenment! I'd like to confirm this by experiment, but short of showing you REAL REALITY, it's hard to prove it!