Goldfish Facts #2

It’s Tuesday, it’s some time in the early hours of the morning, it’s time for Goldfish Facts! [...] made a point about my previous facts, which included the assertion that Jaws was the most popular name for a goldfish. Despite their sharp appreciation of irony, most goldfish have never even seen the film Jaws. In my experience, they prefer romantic comedies, in particular Richard Curtis movies about the charming if hapless lives of the British upper-middle-classes. Thus, they are much more likely to christen their offspring Sebastian or Henrietta. So my facts could have been wrong. And it may not be the last time.

So then, this week's three exciting, enlightening and perhaps, since it rhymes, frightening facts about everybody's favourite water-dwelling yellow-metal-coloured organism;

• In 1999 a Heron dropped a live goldfish down the chimney of a London family. The fish survived. There’s got to a punch-line to this one but I haven’t thought of it yet.
• Goldfish are thought to be (only thought, mind you) the most popular pet in the world. More popular than cats and dogs. I don’t find this surprising at all. Goldfish may not be able to fetch your slippers or purr when you stroke them, but they never bring wounded birds into the house and they scare the bejesus out of potential burglars. This is because of the direct link between anti-social and criminal behaviour and an irrational fear of having one's eyeballs sucked out by a goldfish. Honestly, I read a study all about it.
  
• And finally, a semi-fact. All over the Internet I find reports about the existence of a breed called the Chinese Lettered Goldfish; goldfish with Chinese characters on them, something apparently achieved by many years of cross-breeding. However, my subsequent research has concluded that there is no such thing and worse, nobody’s even bothered to doctor a jpeg of a normal goldfish in order to persuade me otherwise. I suppose will have to do it myself.

Having slept so much today I now can't sleep. I have been researching Pre-Raphaelite pictures and all sorts of useless nonsense. Now I will try and write something brilliant and then try going back to bed.